First, as to Pisa. There are no records or signs of a school of art indigenous to Pisa, before the building of the Duomo there. Both Morrona[124] and Ridolfi, the historians of the respective cities, have well searched the archives in both Pisa and Lucca, but can find no single reference to any native artist before the Duomo of Pisa was begun, or even of any Pisan who worked at that building as early as the eleventh century. All the first architects seem to have been imported. Morrona asserts that when the cathedral was begun "the most famous _Masters_ (mark the word) from foreign (_stranieri_) parts, assembled together to give their work to the building." The word _stranieri_ is used by all old Italians not only as meaning foreigners, but Italians from other provinces. Ridolfi, on his part, affirms that at the beginning, the _Maestri di Como_ were the only ones employed in building the chief churches at Lucca; adding that--"Many of the works show certain symbols, monsters and foliage, which were always a special characteristic of the Comacines, and a sign of the Freemasonry founded and propagated by them."[125] From this it may be deduced that during the eleventh and twelfth centuries no indigenous Pisan school existed, and that the mediæval buildings were of the Lombard type. Certainly the old church of S. Pietro a Grado, three miles out of Pisa on the Leghorn road, which we have described, is a standing witness to the presence of the Comacines before this era. It still exists, the most perfect specimen extant of a Lombard tri-apsidal church. Not a shaft, not an archlet is wanting. As to Aquileja and Venice, Selvatico's[126] theory is that the Friuli people, and those of Aquileja, being driven out in 450 by Attila, fled to Grado (another Grado near Venice), thence spread to Torcello and Murano, and then founded Venice. That they built the cathedrals on those islands, and founded the Veneto-Oriental school. Did this native school ever exist? asks Merzario, seeing that the church of Grado was built by _artefici Franchi_, which might mean Freemasons, or French builders, _i.e._ the Comacines under Charlemagne; and that those of Santa Fosca and Murano were, judging by their style, of the same origin? The church of Torcello was rebuilt in the eleventh century by the Bishop Orso Orseolo, and if it comes into the question at all, would prove that the Lombard school had something to do with it then. In spite of these two opposing opinions, it is certain that architecture took a certain distinctive form in Venice; but it was a later development which occurred after the twelfth century, and with which the Greeks and Byzantines had little or nothing to do.