So it doubtless would be in a purely Italian city; but here we are in the city where the Norman displaced the Greek. The two great churches of Bari, like that of Bitonto, have their towers wrought into the building in Norman fashion, and at the _duomo_ the great round baptistery is also merged in the same mass with the church and its towers. Both of the great churches of Bari have east ends of the same kind as that at Bitonto; the apses are swallowed up; the place where the great apse should be is marked by a single splendid Romanesque window. The eastern towers of St. Nicolas have never been carried up; at St. Sabinus the southern one has perished, but the northern one still soars in all its majesty, thoroughly Italian in its conception, but rather to be called Norman in its detail. St. Nicolas has also another pair of unfinished towers at its west end, standing at once beyond the aisles as at Wells and Rouen, and in front of them as at Holyrood. They flank a grand Italian front which one would think would be finer without them. These western towers are absent in the metropolitan church; but that has a most perfect octagonal cupola over the crossing, the grouping of which with the two lofty eastern towers, if there was any point from which it could really be seen, must have been wonderful. Thus, in both churches, something of a German outline has either been consciously brought in or has been incidentally stumbled on. The four towers of St. Nicolas, the octagon and eastern tower of St. Sabinus, will easily find Rhenish fellows, though we should perhaps have to go as far as Angoulême for a single tower of equal majesty mourning over a vanished brother. In other points the external arrangements of the two great churches of Bari have much in common. The rose windows, the coupled windows, the blank arcades, are much the same in both. So is the choice of animal forms for the fanciful supports of columns. In most places the lion discharges that function--in a building designed by lions we should doubtless see something different. So we do here at Bari, where the solid forms of the _pachydermata_ are, perhaps discreetly, preferred to the lighter _carnivora_. The elephant, we think, is to be found in both churches, and the huge earth-shaking beast is represented so as to remind us both of Pyrrhos and of Hannibal; some have the smaller ear of India, some the larger of Africa. The hippopotamus appears only in the west front of St. Nicolas. Had the daring shipfolk who bore away the saint's bones from Lykia made their way to the Nile also?