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It is not too hot during the day, as it is by the sea, and it can be almost chilly by night, which it never is below. Every one is in a holiday frame of mind; even the ladies of Eryx go out, whereas during the winter they seldom leave the house, unless, perhaps, after a storm for a turn in the balio to see how the trees look when laden with snow.
On these occasions three days of humiliation are proclaimed, priests and men, their heads crowned with thorns, their necks encircled with cords, go about the town flagellating themselves; in the evening fires are lighted in the balio, and all the villages below answer by lighting fires too, to show that they are taking part in the general tribulation.
The church consists of a nave and aisles of four bays, transepts higher than the side but lower than the centre aisle of the nave, three vaulted apses to the east, and at the south-west corner a square tower. Like many Portuguese buildings Sta. Maria de Leça do Balio looks at first sight a good deal earlier than is really the case.
In the afternoon there were horse-races outside the Trapani gate on a fairly level piece of road, and a concert and illumination in the balio in the evening. In the course of the day I bought a copy of the explanatory pamphlet. Its title was L'Arca Noetica. Simbolo Mariano. Ultimo Lunedi d'Agosto, 1901. It was to be a procession of cars, there were to be no figures on horseback.
The programme for the next day contained nothing till 5 p.m., when there were more horse-races, then Vespers in the Matrice, brilliantly illuminated; after dusk fireworks outside the Trapani Gate, and at night a concert in the illuminated balio. In the afternoon of Wednesday, the 28th, a procession of fifty-nine mules and horses passed through the town.
If there is no excursion or no special occupation, we go to the caffe or the club, or call on the chemist who is sure to be surrounded by friends, or sit in the balio smoking and talking nonsense by the hour. And there is always the inexhaustible wonder of the great view.
Inside the church itself is not very remarkable, having a nave and aisles with transepts and three vaulted chapels to the east, built very much in the same style as is the church at Leça do Balio, except that it has a fine west front, to be mentioned later, that the roof of the nave was knocked down by the Devil in 1548 in anger at the extreme piety of Frey Martinho de Santarem, one of the canons, and that many famous people, including Pedro Alvares Cabral, the discoverer of Brazil, are therein buried.
From the balio the whole journey was visible, except when the windings of the road hid part of the crowd, and, with the help of glasses, the arrival at the sanctuary could be seen distinctly at about 5 p.m., nearly nine hours after the morning start. On ordinary occasions the journey takes about three hours.
For example, the unusually large transverse arches of the nave occur at Batalha, and the large plain western door is clearly related to such later doors as those at Leça do Balio or of São Francisco at Oporto.
The battlements also of the castle at Guimarães are found not only at Coimbra, but as late as 1336 in the church of Leça do Balio near Oporto, and, modified in shape by the renaissance even in the sixteenth-century churches of Villa do Conde and of Azurara.
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