Probably the visitor who has just arrived in the cathedral piazza may not immediately see with how great beauty Ravello has been adorned. It is certainly no more than the wreck of what it once was. But this can be said of so many Italian towns that the point may be scarcely worth making. The cathedral once possessed a beautiful porch, approached from the piazza by a double flight of seventeen white marble steps. It has none now. Within is a lamentable scene of desolation, a church once filled with glorious works of art among which rather more than a century ago a bishop was allowed to work his will. An Anglican rector with a passion for encaustic tiles could not have wrought more mischief. The bishop's conception of beauty lay in the whitewash pot. This simple ideal he worked out with such thoroughness that in all the church only two half-figures remain of the noble frescoes which were once its pride. The bishop looked round, saw that it was well, and began on the mosaics, which were priceless and beyond all praise. The most beautiful of these was probably the baldacchino which surmounted the high altar. This the energetic bishop got rid of altogether, unless it be the fact, as some suppose, that a few scraps of it are embedded in the bishops throne. There were fifty-two choir stalls of carved walnut wood. They dated from the year 1320, and anyone who surveys the relics of the great beauty with which the founders of the church equipped it may guess that the choir stalls were rarely lovely. Not one chip remains of them. By the time he had done all this the bishop had made much progress towards bringing his lovely cathedral to the condition of some Bible Christian chapel in a country village. But the church was full of marbles. Out they went, no one knows where. The pulpit was among the most exquisite of man's works. He began to deface it, but something stayed his hand, I cannot guess what, for such a man must have been impenetrable to remorse. The man who did us this intolerable wrong was called Tafuri, and I hope visitors to Ravello will not forget him.