As it is still Gothic, I suppose this restoration to have consisted merely in bungling repairs of the old work. We may consider, therefore, the original design as far as we can trace it, as an example of the architecture of the beginning of the fifteenth century at Naples, a period at which Brunelleschi was flourishing at Florence, and the Gothic forms were already discarded. I conceive it to have offered the sort of arrangement exhibited in the following sketch, with a large gable in the middle, perhaps formed on an equilateral triangle, and a smaller and more acute one on each side. [Illustration: Illustration of church front] The upper gable is now truncated, and the spaces between the smaller ones and the building, are walled up, forming an uglier front than you can well conceive, out of what really appears to have been a pleasing composition. The cathedral at Mantua seems to have been an edifice of the same style. The inside is almost all modernized; two or three of the side chapels alone retaining traces of the time of their erection. It is said to contain 110 columns of Egyptian granite and African breccia, belonging to the ancient temple of Apollo; but if so, they must have been very small, less than eighteen inches in diameter, and they are now all covered with stucco. (You see the English churchwardens have authority for what they do.) I rather, however, doubt the fact. On the left hand is the ancient church of Santa Restituta; here are indubitably many ancient shafts. They are all small, but vary both in size, and material. The capitals are in bad condition; one or two may have been good, but in general they are of poor design, and bad workmanship; few of them fit the shafts; large moulded blocks are placed above the capitals to receive the springing of the arches. These are now pointed, but were at first probably semicircular. The Gothic work patched upon the original building has been _rococoed_,[21] and the whole is perfectly devoid of architectural effect.