At Stagno there are some interesting fortifications of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. This position was of great strategic value, as it is a narrow isthmus connecting the long peninsula of Sabbioncello with the mainland. A large square castle was erected at Stagno Grande, looking southwards towards Ragusa, another with a round tower at Stagno Piccolo, on the north side of the isthmus, and a third at the top of the hill between the two. Both towns were surrounded by walls;[520] a long wall goes right across the neck of land, and another clambers up the hill to the highest of the three castles and down the other side to Stagno Piccolo. The appearance of these battlemented walls, with towers at frequent intervals, is most impressive, and they were a most remarkable piece of work for their time. They secured Ragusa from attack, whether from the Venetians at the mouths of the Narenta, or from the Slavonic princelings of the hinterland, and later from the Turks. Both in Stagno Grande and in Stagno Piccolo there are some churches and private houses with architectural decorations. The Franciscan monastery at the former place has a cloister in the best Dalmatian style, and in a field near the salt-pans is a small church, which may be of the Romanesque period. It is obvious that Ragusan architecture was strongly, indeed prevalently, inspired by Venetian example, both in the work which we have called Venetian Gothic and in that of the Renaissance period. Although, as a rule, the earlier artistic forms survived much longer in Dalmatia than in Italy, the Dalmatians showed what Graham Jackson calls “a natural and almost precocious liking for the Renaissance style.” Giorgi Orsini’s work at Sebenico actually preceded that of Leon Battista Alberti at Rimini by nine years. Another peculiarity of Ragusan architecture is that the names of so few of the artists themselves are preserved, and most of those who are remembered were foreigners. There were doubtless many native artists, but Ragusan talent seems to have been of a collective rather than an individual character, and much of the work was probably done by master-masons, stone-cutters, and similar craftsmen, and may have been the outcome of the general artistic feeling of the people rather than the conception of great masters.