ough the Canale di
Sabbioncello, with exquisite panoramas unrolling on either hand, and
dropped anchor off the quay of Curzola, where the governor of the
islands, Admiral Piazza, awaited us with his staff. In spite of the
bleakness of the surrounding mountains, Curzola is one of the most
exquisitely beautiful little towns that I have ever seen. The next time
you are in the Adriatic you should not fail to go there. Time and the
hand of man--for the people are a color-loving race--have given many
tints, soft and bright, to its roofs, towers, and ramparts. It is a town
of dim, narrow, winding streets, of steep flights of worn stone steps,
of moss-covered archways, and of some of the most splendid specimens of
the domestic architecture of the Middle Ages that exist outside of the
Street of the Crusaders in Rhodes. The sole modern touches are the
costumes of the islanders, and they are sufficiently picturesque not to
spoil the picture. How the place has escaped the motion-picture people I
fail to understand. (As a matter of fact, it hasn't, for I took with me
an operator and a camera--the first the islanders had ever seen.)
Besides the Cathedral of San Marco, with its splendid doors, its
exquisitely carved choir-stalls black with age and use, its choir
balustrade and pulpit of translucent alabaster, and its dim old
altar-piece by Tintoretto, the town boasts the Loggia or council
chambers, the palace of the Venetian governors, the noble mansion of the
Arnieri, and, brooding over all, a towering campanile, five centuries
old. The Lion of St. Mark, which appears on several of the public
buildings, holds beneath its paw a closed instead of an open
book--symbolizing, so I was told, the islanders' dissatisfaction with
certain laws of the Venetians.

But the phase of my visit which I enjoyed the most was when Admiral
Piazza took us across the bay, on a Detroit-built submarine-chaser, to a
Franciscan monastery dating from the fifteenth century. We were met by
the abbot at the water-stairs, and, after being shown the beautiful
Venetian Gothic cloisters, with alabaster columns whose carving was
almost lacelike in its delicate tracery, we were led along a wooded path
beside the sea, over a carpet of pine-needles, to a cloistered
rose-garden, in which stood, amid a bower of blossoms, a blue and white
statue of the Virgin. The fragrance of the flowers in the little
enclosure was like the incense in a church, above our heads the great
pi