Yet the monumental wealth of Trieste is all but equal to the monumental wealth of Ancona.  At Ancona we have the cathedral church and the triumphal arch; so we have at Trieste; tho’ at Trieste we have nothing to set against the grand front of the lower and smaller church of Ancona.  But at Ancona arch and duomo both stand out before all eyes; at Trieste both have to be looked for.  The church of Saint Justus at Trieste crowns the hill as well as the church of Saint Cyriacus at Ancona; but it does not in the same way proclaim its presence.  The castle, with its ugly modern fortifications, rises again above the church; and the duomo of Trieste, with its shapeless outline and its low, heavy, unsightly campanile, does not catch the eyes like the Greek cross and cupola of Ancona.

Again at Trieste the arch could never, in its best days, have been a rival to the arch at Ancona; and now either we have to hunt it out by an effort, or else it comes upon us suddenly, standing, as it does, at the head of a mean street on the ascent to the upper town.  Of a truth it can not compete with Ancona or with Rimini, with Orange[6] or with Aosta.  But the duomo, utterly unsightly as it is in a general view, puts on quite a new character when we first see the remains of pagan times imprisoned in the lower stage of the heavy campanile, still more so when we take our first glance of its wonderful interior.  At the first glimpse we see that here there is a mystery to be unraveled; and as we gradually find the clue to the marvelous changes which it has undergone, we feel that outside show is not everything, and that, in point both of antiquity and of interest, tho’ not of actual beauty, the double basilica of Trieste may claim no mean place among buildings of its own type.  Even after the glories of Rome and Ravenna, the Tergestine church may be studied with no small pleasure and profit, as an example of a kind of transformation of which neither Rome nor Ravenna can supply another example....

The other ancient relic at Trieste is the small triumphal arch.  On one side it keeps its Corinthian pilasters; on the other they are imbedded in a house.  The arch is in a certain sense double; but the two are close together, and touch in the keystone.  The Roman date of this arch can not be doubted; but legends connect it both with Charles the Great and with Richard of Poitou and of England, a prince about whom Tergestine fancy has been very busy.  The popular name of the arch is Arco Riccardo.

Such, beside some fragments in the museum, are all the remains that the antiquary will find in Trieste; not much in point of number, but, in the case of the duomo at least, of surpassing interest in their own way.  But the true merit of Trieste is not in anything that it has itself, its church, its arch, its noble site.  Placed there at the head of the gulf, on the borders of two great portions of the Empire, it leads to the land which produced that line of famous Illyrian Emperors who for a while checked the advance of our own race in the world’s history, and it leads specially to the chosen home of the greatest among them.[7] The chief glory of Trieste, after all, is that it is the way to Spalato....