Meaning to
stay for a week or two I sought a pleasant room in a well-situated
hotel, and I found one with a good view of town and harbour. The
Taranto of old days, when it was called Taras, or later Tarentum,
stood on a long peninsula, which divides a little inland sea from
the great sea without. In the Middle Ages the town occupied only the
point of this neck of land, which, by the cutting of an artificial
channel, had been made into an island: now again it is spreading
over the whole of the ancient site; great buildings of
yellowish-white stone, as ugly as modern architect can make them,
and plainly far in excess of the actual demand for habitations, rise
where Phoenicians and Greeks and Romans built after the nobler
fashion of their times. One of my windows looked towards the old
town, with its long sea-wall where fishermen's nets hung drying, the
dome of its Cathedral, the high, squeezed houses, often with gardens
on the roofs, and the swing-bridge which links it to the mainland;
the other gave me a view across the Mare Piccolo, the Little Sea (it
is some twelve miles round about), dotted in many parts with crossed
stakes which mark the oyster-beds, and lined on this side with a
variety of shipping moored at quays.
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