Capua of Hannibal and Marcellus, but the Capua which succeeded Aversa as the seat of the elder but the less famous of the Norman powers in Southern Italy. As we mark the advance of national union, no less than as we mark the advance of mere dynastic aggression, we have sometimes to think, for a moment perhaps to mourn, that "kingdoms have shrunk to provinces," though in this form of advance and incorporation, we have no longer to add that "chains clank over sceptred cities." Capua, on both its sites, once the head of an Etruscan, once of a Norman dominion, passed, in one age, under the universal rule of Rome. In another age it again sank from its separate headship to become a member of that greater Norman dominion in Apulia and Sicily which, after more shiftings, unions, divisions, transfers to distant rulers, than any other part of Europe, has in our days been merged in the realm of united Italy, with Rome as its head, but not its mistress. We reach then the height which, whether that of Jupiter or Diana of old, is now the height of the warrior archangel. The whole history of the church belongs to the independent days of the second Capua; in its present shape it belongs to the days of independent Norman rule in the second Capua. But the days of independent Norman rule were days when the arts of the earlier rulers of the land still lived on. We see signs of the art of Byzantium, so long mistress of Southern Italy, and of the art of the Saracen, in Italy only a visitor or an invader, while in Sicily an abiding master. The portico in front of the church is Roman in its general idea; but, instead of the colonnade and entablature of the Laurentian basilica, we see an arcade whose pointed arches at once call up memories of Sicily. They have indeed little of Sicilian grace. Nowhere at Palermo or Monreale do we see such massive columns bearing such massive stilts. Columns indeed we should hardly say, as some of them are plainly mere fragments. But here, just as in Sicily, just as in Aquitaine, the pointed arch is no sign of coming Gothic; the style is still wholly Romanesque, and somewhat rude Romanesque too. And in this region of Italy we can hardly doubt as to attributing the almost accidental shape of the arches to the influence of Saracen models, perhaps to the workmanship of Saracen craftsmen. Hard by, but not joining the building, by an arrangement unlike Sicily, unlike Apulia, but the common rule of Northern Italy, rises a bell-tower, or rather the beginning of a bell-tower, which raises our wonder as to what it would have been if it had ever grown to its full height. Two stages only are finished, the lower of hewn stone, the upper of brick; but their bulk is so great that the tower, if it had ever been finished, would surely have ranked among the highest of its class, utterly overpowering even the great basilica at its side, except so far as it would have been itself overpowered by the natural heights above it.