[28] Gundiberga ... intra ticinensem Civitatem in honorem Beati Joannis Baptistae construxit.--_Paul. Diac._ lib. iv. cap. 4. This must not be confounded with the Baptistery which was built by Bishop Damiano in the same century. [29] Several of the Lombard towers in Rome have this peculiar ornamentation. [30] _Antichità Romantiche d'Italia_, da Difendente e Giuseppe Sacchi, p. 70, _et seq._ [31] Felice quoque meæ sorori ejus tres annulos transmisi due cum jacintis, et unum cum albula.--Gregor. _Epist. ad Teod._ lib. xiv. [32] Paulus Diaconus, _Sto. Longo._ lib. iv. cap. 20. [33] _Ibid._ iv. 21. [34] Ricci, _Architettura d'Italia_, Vol. I. ch. viii. p. 221. [35] _Paul Diac._ Lib. V. ch. xxxiv. [36] _Antiq. Long. Milanesi_, Tom. I. Dissertation i. p. 46. [37] There is a very good instance of this in the Baptistery at Florence, which was also a ceremonial church. [38] This was said to have been built by Agilulf, 591-615, and rebuilt by Luitprand. It was again restored in 1152, when Pope Innocent II. reconsecrated it. [39] In the fifteenth century the fine mausoleum, known as the Arco di S. Agostino, was erected over them by a later Comacine Master, Bonino da Campiglione. In the eighteenth century the church, having fallen into disuse, was turned into a hay store for the army, and the Arco was, in 1786, moved into the modern church of Gesù, where it remained till placed in the cathedral, where it now is. [40] _Études sur l'histoire de l'art_, vol. ii. p. 157. Paris, 1864. [41] Paulus Diaconus Warnefridi, _Chron. de gestis Langobardorum_, Lib. V. cap. iii. [42] _Antiq. Long. Mil._ Tom. I. Dissertation i. p. 68. [43] "Prese molti corpi de' santi dai contorni di Roma, fatti poi trasportare a Pavia." [44] It seems probable that the sandstone capitals alone belonged to the first eighth-century church, and the marble ones to the eleventh-century restoration. There is now a modern church built over the old crypt. [45] _Dell' Architettura in Italia_, viii. 257. [46] _See_ Sacchi, _Antichità Romantiche d'Italia_, p. 98. [47] Ricci (_Dell' Architettura_, etc.) tells us the spiral column was very anciently used in Asia, and that Rome did not adopt it till Hadrian's return from the East. Under the later Cæsars it became usual, but it fell into disuse in the rest of Italy. The Byzantines used it in some buildings, and in these two early Longobardic imitations of the East, we have a curious masonic link with the ancient traditions of Solomon's Temple, which Josephus tells us was adorned with spiral columns. It may be that they were old Roman columns carried up the mountain from some ruin, but I should rather take them as one of the first instances of the use of the spiral column by the Comacines, a form to which they were devoted in later times. There are endless instances of spiral colonnettes on the façades of Romanesque churches of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.