The finest existing church of the Longobardic times is the Basilica of S. Michele at Pavia, which is still intact, and may be taken as the culminating point of the first Lombard style. It has all the distinctive marks of Comacine work at the period. There is the Roman form of the Latin cross with nave and two aisles divided by clustered columns supporting round arches. The walls above the central nave terminate in a sculptured string course, and over that a clerestory, the double Lombard arches of which are divided by marble colonnettes with sculptured capitals. The central nave terminates in a semi-circular apse, surrounded with pilasters and arches; beneath it is a crypt supported on two rows of columns whose capitals are covered with bizarre sculptures. The crypt is now entered by steps beneath the ones leading to the tribune, but originally it had two entrances at the sides of the tribune as in the crypt at Torcello, and that of San Zeno at Verona, which are also of the seventh century. Another particularity is in the inequality of the aisles, the left wall tending to the right, the right transept being longer and larger than the left. This is not, we are told, an accident, but one of the many symbolical forms used by the Comacines. Cordero and Vitet both refer to it. The latter says--"Souvent le plan de l'église penché de gauche à droite. Cette inclination est attribuée, comme on sait, au pieux désirs d'imiter la position du Sauveur expirant sur la croix."[40] As a whole the interior is grand and imposing, and as it stands now, retains the general plan of the original church. Some parts have been restored in the fifteenth century, especially the four principal piers which sustain the central arch, but by the difference in the work and in the sculptures we may easily distinguish the added parts. A Latin inscription in the apse, without date, proves that the great central arch of the roof and that of the choir were renewed by Bartolommeo Negri. There was a Bartolommeo Negri who was canon in 1496, but the antique style of the epitaph would point to an earlier restorer of the same name (we all know how families keep the same set of Christian names for centuries in Italy), especially as the painting in the apse is attributed to Andrino d'Edesia, who lived about 1330. Some interesting relics in the church are the circular slabs of black and green marble, now in the floor of the nave. Tradition, confirmed by Padre Romualdo, says that these were the stones on which the daïs was placed for the coronation of the Lombard kings. Just as the interior of S. Michele at Pavia is the most perfect existing example of the classical form reduced by the Comacines to Christian use and symbolism, so is the façade as perfect a specimen of their mediæval-oriental decoration at this time as can be found. We give an illustration of it.