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The tide is scarcely perceptible, and the currents are very slight. The land is still sinking, as is proved by the Roman sarcophagi found beneath the water at Vranjic and the submerged roads between Aquileia and Grado; while there are records of the destruction of ancient towns from sudden subsidences, as that of Cissa, near Rovigno.
It is but a short distance hence to the entrance to the magnificent harbour of Pola. Craftsmen of Rovigno have made the name of the town celebrated, such as the sculptors Lorenzo and Antonio del Vescovo, who worked in 1468 at the Camaldulan church of Murano, and Taddeo da Rovigno, who did much decorative carving in Venetian palaces.
The Canal of Fasana, between the Brioni Islands and the mainland, a little to the south, was the scene of the crushing defeat of the Venetians by the Genoese in 1379. The quarries in these islands, together with those of Rovigno, provided stone for the ducal and other palaces, the Procuratie at Venice, the murazzi at Chioggia, and the mole at Malamocco.
It is a seaside resort, visited a good deal for bathing during the summer months, and there is also, as at Rovigno, an establishment for scrofulous children. But its chief attraction for us is archæological, for it contains early Christian antiquities of considerable importance.
The only place of importance passed is Rovigno, though the Canal di Leme, an arm of the sea 7-½ miles long, from 70 to 100 ft. deep, and some 500 yds. broad, which affords accommodation for much more shipping than ever makes use of it, leads up towards Due Castelli, now ruinous, but at one time a thriving and important town.
The next place along the coast, after passing the Promontory of Salvore and turning south, is Umago. It is sheltered behind a shoal, upon which the Chronicles say that the ship laden with the relics of S. Mark struck during a storm on its way to Venice. It was given as a feud to the bishop of Trieste in 929, at Pavia, by Ugo of Provence, king of Italy, and to the bishop of Cittanova in 1029 or 1038 by the Emperor Conrad. It had been sacked by the Slavs of Croatia and Dalmatia in 876, at the same time with Cittanova, Rovigno, and Sipar (at which last place very early wall-paintings are said to exist). It swore fealty to Venice in 1269; but very little is known of its history, the English apparently having burnt the archives in the piazza early in the nineteenth century. At that period no one seems to have thought that such things could be of any value; indeed at Portole, about 1850, the podest
Dotting the western coast of Istria, between Trieste and Pola, are four small towns Parenzo, Pirano, Capodistria and Rovigno all purely and distinctively Italian, and, on the other side of the peninsula, the famous resort of Abbazia, popular with wealthy Hungarians and with the yachtsmen of all nations before the war.
Just as the Trentino and the Upper Adige have been added to the kingdom as the Province of Trent, so the redeemed regions of which Trieste is the center, including the towns of Gorizia, Monfalcone, Capodistria, Parenzo, Pirano, Rovigno and Pola, have been consolidated in the new province of Julian Venetia, with about a million inhabitants and an area of approximately 6,000 square miles.
The throne has a very shallow step. The figure of S. George is a repetition of that by Benedetto's father in S. Francesco. Outside the walls, on the road to Porto Rose, are the ruins of the monastery of S. Bernardino, founded in 1450 by S. Giovanni da Capistrano, to whom the ruined convent on the island opposite Rovigno is also due.
In the sacristy is a fourteenth or fifteenth-century picture on a gold ground a figure of S. John the Baptist, with incidents from his life. It came from a church dedicated to him which was destroyed in 1839. Rovigno and the neighbourhood have suffered much from piracy. In 965 the Slavs sacked the city.
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