actually there must be of later date. Also there either has been or has been meant to be a portico over the lower stage of the west front, a thoroughly Italian notion. But the east end takes almost the form of a Norman west front; a Norman founder, it would seem, was not happy unless he could somewhere or other get two towers with an ornamental wall between them. To this end the apses are sacrificed. Instead of the three curved projections which form the main features of so many Italian, German, and indeed Norman, east ends, the whole east end is flat. The side apses are disguised by towers, one only of which is carried up to any height, while the great apse is hidden by the wall between the towers. Herein is the difference between Bitonto and Trani. At Trani there are no eastern towers, and the apses, though of amazing external height and no less amazing slightness of projection, are still real apses with a real curve. At Bitonto no one could know from the outside that there were any apses at all. As the ordinary ranges of arcades and windows are thus made impossible, the architect, like an English architect some generations later, threw his strength into a single east window, and certainly made one as large and as rich as was possible before the invention of tracery. An elaborate round-headed opening is covered with rich devices, and has wonderful monsters to bear up its side-shafts. This too is to be seen at Trani, and we shall come again to other examples at Bari. There is something very strange in these attempts to reconcile the ideas of Normandy and of Italy in one building. But in these flat east ends the result is that we get something which is certainly neither Italian nor Norman, and which can hardly be approved according to any law of either reality or beauty. The same spirit of compromise goes on in other parts. The endless columns of the under-church supply a rich study of capitals, largely of the grotesque kind. Men, monkeys, the original ram's horn, leaves, the Imperial eagle--better suited for the purpose than anything else--all do duty as volutes. The columns in the upper-church too give another rich collection of various kinds of human, animal, and vegetable forms. But here a soberer spirit reigns; though perhaps no one capital is strictly classical, yet the grotesque does not reign as it does below. Three arches from columns, a solid block, three more arches from columns, make up the nave. Over these Italian elements Norman taste set a triforium; modern taste has hidden the clerestory. Outside, the Italian has his way in the rich open arcades of the parapets and in the windows of various forms, filled, some of them, with that kind of pierced tracery which is neither Italian nor Norman, but distinctively Oriental, and which look as if they had come--as they possibly may have come--from a mosque.