tremendous drenching thunderstorm and a great whirlwind. And then, very
suddenly, all became quiet again, save for the rain-water pouring off
the roofs into the street below.



CHAPTER VI

AQUILEIA AND GRADO

On July 22nd, the day before I returned from Palmanova to my Battery,
Shield and I and two lorryloads of men made an expedition in the
afternoon to Aquileia and Grado. Aquileia, at the height of the old
Roman power, was a great and important city, on the main road eastwards
from the North Italian plain. It was destroyed and sacked by Attila and
his Huns in the year 452, and again in 568 by Alboin and his Lombards.
It was the fugitives from Aquileia and the neighbouring towns, who,
taking refuge in the lagoons along the coast, founded upon certain
mudbanks in the fifth century the city which was destined to be Venice.
And it was at Grado in the year 466 that the foundations of Venetian
constitutional history were laid by the election of tribunes to govern
the affairs of the community inhabiting the lagoons.

The two chief features of Aquileia to-day are a museum of Roman
antiquities, which I had not time to visit, and a large church, with a
bare interior, but with a magnificent eleventh century mosaic floor, one
of the best examples of its kind in Italy. The interior of the church
was decorated with flowers in shell cases, to signify its reconquest by
the Italians, who intend to make here a great national memorial when the
war is over. Beside the church, at its eastern end, stood a glorious