Without looking about you at all, you may find, in your Murray, the useful information that it is a church which “consists of a very wide nave and lateral aisles, separated by seven fine pointed arches.” And as you will be--under ordinary conditions of tourist hurry--glad to learn so much, _without_ looking, it is little likely to occur to you that this nave and two rich aisles required also, for your complete present comfort, walls at both ends, and a roof on the top. It is just possible, indeed, you may have been struck on entering, by the curious disposition of painted glass at the east end;--more remotely possible that, in returning down the nave, you may this moment have noticed the extremely small circular window at the west end; but the chances are a thousand to one that, after being pulled from tomb to tomb round the aisles and chapels, you should take so extraordinary an additional amount of pains as to look up at the roof,--unless you do it now, quietly. It will have had its effect upon you, even if you don’t, without your knowledge. You will return home with a general impression that Santa Croce is, somehow, the ugliest Gothic church you ever were in. Well, that is really so; and now, will you take the pains to see why? There are two features, on which, more than on any others, the grace and delight of a fine Gothic building depends; one is the springing of its vaultings, the other the proportion and fantasy of its traceries. _This_ church of Santa Croce has no vaultings at all, but the roof of a farmhouse barn. And its windows are all of the same pattern,--the exceedingly prosaic one of two pointed arches, with a round hole above, between them. And to make the simplicity of the roof more conspicuous, the aisles are successive sheds, built at every arch. In the aisles of the Campo Santo at Pisa, the unbroken flat roof leaves the eye free to look to the traceries; but here, a succession of up-and-down sloping beam and lath gives the impression of a line of stabling rather than a church aisle. And lastly, while, in fine Gothic buildings, the entire perspective concludes itself gloriously in the high and distant apse, here the nave is cut across sharply by a line of ten chapels, the apse being only a tall recess in the midst of them, so that, strictly speaking, the church is not of the form of a cross, but of a letter T. Can this clumsy and ungraceful arrangement be indeed the design of the renowned Arnolfo? Yes, this is the purest Arnolfo-Gothic; not beautiful by any means; but deserving, nevertheless, our thoughtfullest examination. We will trace its complete character another day: just now we are only concerned with this pre-Christian form of the letter T, insisted upon in the lines of chapels.