Lesina

“We anchored during the night at Spalato, where I passed some pleasant months before leaving Dalmatia; and next day, at noon, we arrived at Lesina, a narrow island, forty miles long, which derived its importance from having been the principal station of the Venetian fleet during the palmy days of the Republic. Pleasing and prepossessing is the name of Lesina to the ear, and not less pleasing is her aspect to the eye. The town, with 2000 inhabitants, is at the bottom of a little bay, entirely surrounded with mountains, which rise so abruptly as only to leave a narrow space for the town and quay. As the steamer dropped anchor, I felt myself once more in the south. A few days ago, on the passes of the Vellebitch, a greatcoat was welcome; here the air was mild, the steep hills all around were covered with aloes, and the boats that swarmed up the ship-side carried men who sold white purses made of the fine cordage of the aloe-fibre. The slender palm-branches hung over the garden-walls that sfirted the bay, and the carob-trees rising among the rocks carried my mind to the nobler slopes of Lebanon. […]. Nor were the sensations raised by art on landing in Lesina less novel and agreeable than those of external nature. A denizen of the soil of factories and railways, where utility is too often divorced from elegance, I was delighted to find in a mere arsenal and depôt fo marine stores a public piazza, such as would do honour to an European capital. In a nook of the hills is this square, composed of Venetian Gothic houses. […]. Prominent among all the edifices of Lesina, and facing the sea, is the Loggia, or place of municipal council, by Sammicheli. Being without doors and windows, the inmates were protected from the summer’s sun, but not from the winter’s cold. In this loggia of Dalmatia a peasant may see the permanent causes of the organic inferiority of the north to the south in architecture (pp. 32-33)”.