At Pola the monuments of Pietas Julia claim the first place; the basilica, tho’ not without a certain special interest, comes long after them.  The character of the place is fixt by the first sight of it; we see the present and we see the more distant past; the Austrian navy is to be seen, and the amphitheater is to be seen.  But intermediate times have little to show; if the duomo strikes the eye at all, it strikes it only by the extreme ugliness of its outside, nor is there anything very taking, nothing like the picturesque castle of Pirano, in the works which occupy the site of the colonial capitol.  The duomo should not be forgotten; even the church of Saint Francis is worth a glance; but it is in the remains of the Roman colony, in the amphitheater, the arches, the temples, the fragments preserved in that temple which serves, as at Nimes,[8] for a museum, that the real antiquarian wealth of Pola lies....

The known history of Pola begins with the Roman conquest of Istria in 178 B.C.  The town became a Roman colony and a flourishing seat of commerce.  Its action on the republican side in the civil war brought on it the vengeance of the second Caesar.  But the destroyer became the restorer, and Pietas Julia, in the height of its greatness, far surpassed the extent either of the elder or the younger Pola.  Like all cities of this region, Pola kept up its importance down to the days of the Carlovingian Empire, the specially flourishing time of the whole district being that of Gothic and Byzantine dominion at Ravenna.  A barbarian king, the Roxolan Rasparasanus, is said to have withdrawn to Pola after the submission of his nation to Hadrian; and the panegyrists of the Flavian house rank Pola along with Trier and Autun among the cities which the princes of that house had adorned or strengthened.  But in the history of their dynasty the name of the city chiefly stands out as the chosen place for the execution of princes whom it was convenient to put out of the way.

Here Crispus died at the bidding of Constantine, and Gallus at the bidding of Constantius.  Under Theodoric, Pola doubtless shared that general prosperity of the Istrian land on which Cassiodorus grows eloquent when writing to its inhabitants.  In the next generation Pola appears in somewhat of the same character which has come back to it in our own times; it was there that Belisarius gathered the Imperial fleet for his second and less prosperous expedition against the Gothic lords of Italy.  But, after the break up of the Frankish Empire, the history of medieval Pola is but a history of decline.  It was, in the geography of Dante, the furthest city of Italy; but, like most of the other cities of its own neighborhood, its day of greatness had passed away when Dante sang.