Spalato
“Almost half of Spalato’s 20,000 souls live within the walls of Diocletian’s palace. This latter is a rectangle, built upon the plan of the fortified Roman camp, enclosing within its cyclopean walls, eighty feet in height, an entire quarter of the modern city. At each angle of the walls stands a massive tower. In the centre of each façade a gate opens, except in that turned toward the sea, where a narrow postern admitted the royal barge. One cross-street divides the enclosure into a northern and southern half, connecting the Silver Gate with the Iron Gate; another leads from the northern or Golden Gate to the entrance of the Imperial apartments. It was through the Golden Gate - the Porta Aurea, still in excellent preservation - that Diocletian entered his palace when coming from Salone. […].
A stately façade occupies the south end and gives access to a circular structure whose lower travertine walls alone remain. The spaces between the western colonnade have been filled in with mediæval houses, but on the east side the columns stand free. Two Sphinxes, mute and inscrutable, look down on the steps ascending to the so-called Mausoleum, a building vying in interest with the Pantheon of Rome. […]. This dome and that of the Pantheon are the only two left to us from ancient times” (pp. 78-79).
”The old part of the city within the walls is now most densely packed. The few streets are dark and but five or six feet wide, the houses squeezed together and pushed up six or seven stories high. Yet here and there a fine old palace is encountered, rich with armorial bearings, carven doorways and traceried windows. The south wall of the palace, with a warm, sunny outlook over the sea, is now honeycombed with modern apartments, whose brightly colored window-shutters contrast vividly with the classic half-columns surrounding them. On the parapet three-story dwellings are perched, and along the quay that skirts the base, tobacconists and drinking-houses and little ship-chandlers’ shops are barnacled to the huge Roman stones. […].
The east wall looks down upon the Pazar - a great open-air market - which on Monday gathers in a horde of peasants. The restless sea of humanity, the conglomeration of color, is fascinating, but bewilderind in the extreme. Soon the eye learns to distinguish groups and individuals - here the venders of game and wild-fowl, there the sellers of turkeys and chickens, miserable-looking fowl lying with feet tied together and a disconsolate droop in the eye; along the road, pretty girls in red caps (the distinctive badge of unmarried women), stand among mountains of corn-husks, selling them at a florin a load, said load to be delivered on their own fair shoulders. A mender of saddles plies a brisk trade, for pack-mules and ponies are legion; and so, too, does a fruit-peddler, selling decayed pears to the Turks; and beyond are the red turbans of the Bosnians clustered over piles of meal-sacks, weighing out large wooden measures, the contents of which are verified by men appointed for that purpose, whose business it is to pass a stick over the top of the measure, filling up any chink and scraping off any surplus.
In Spalato we have two favorite walks. One out of the Campo Santo on a rocky ledge high over the sea - a cemetery peacefully quiet, whose white tombs gleam among tall cypresses. By the blue locust shadows that play upon its wall we like to sit and watch the golden sun dip his face behind the distant sea. The other stroll leads up the Monte Marjan, a rocky hill-side rich with southern growth. The city and its ample bay lie at our feet; behind it green rolling hill-sides, and beyond Clissa’s fortress guards against the Turk, between the Golo and the Mosor, than whose sterile flanks the purple flush of orchids or the shadings of a sea-shell are not more tender or more splendid” (pp. 82-84).