f ages these latter works especially
have suffered grievously, as of course has the whole church.

Built in the marsh it has sunk so deeply into it that its pillars are
covered half way up, and the church seems always about to be wholly
engulfed. It was called S. Maria in Porto because it was originally
built near to the famous Port that Augustus Casar had established and
which for so long was the headquarters of the eastern fleet. In the
sixteenth century when the Canons Regular of the Lateran, who then
served it, were compelled to abandon it, they built within the city of
Ravenna another church which they named after that they had left, S.
Maria in Porto. Thereafter the old church without the walls was known
as S. Maria in Porto fuori.

The mighty tower which rises beside S. Maria in Porto fuori has been
thought to be in part the famous Pharos of which Pliny speaks.[1] It
is almost certainly founded upon it, but the lower part in its huge
strength is, as we see it, a work of the end of the twelfth century,
as is the lofty campanile which rises from it.

[Footnote 1: See _supra_, p. 24.]

S. Maria in Porto fuori is undoubtedly the greatest monument that
remains to Ravenna of the Middle Age; nothing really comparable with
it is to be found in the city itself.

The earliest of the friars' churches, those great monuments of the
Middle Age in Italy, is S. Chiara which with its convent is now
suppressed and lost in the Recovero di Mendicita (Corso Garibaldi,
19). This convent, which dates certainly from 1255, was founded by
Chiara da Polenta and was rebuilt in 1794. It is from its garden that
we get our best idea of the church which within possesses frescoes of
the Romagnuol school, where in the vault we see the four Evangelists
with their symbols and the four Doctors of the Church. Upon the walls
we see a spoiled fresco of the Presepio, that peculiarly Franciscan
subject, and again the Annunciation, the Adoration of the Magi, the
Baptism of Our Lord, Christ in the Garden, the Crucifixion, and
various saints. These frescoes are the work of the men who painted in
S. Maria in Porto fuori.

It cannot have been much later that the church of S. Pier Maggiore, of
which I have already spoken,[2] came into Franciscan hands, and
certainly from 1261 it was called S. Francesco, when the archbishop
Filippo Fontana handed it over to the Conventuals who held it till
1810. Its chief mediseval interest lies for us of course in the f