the decayed Benedictine abbey of La Trinita. The building is roofless;
it was never completed, and the ravages of time and of man have not
spared it; earthquakes, too, have played sad tricks with its arches and
columns, particularly that of 1851, which destroyed the neighbouring
town of Melfi. It stands beyond the more modern settlement on what is
now a grassy plain, and attached to it is a Norman chapel containing the
bones of Alberada, mother of Boemund, and others of her race. Little of
the original structure of this church is left, though its walls are
still adorned, in patches, with frescoes of genuine angels--attractive
creatures, as far removed from those bloodless Byzantine anatomies as
from the plethoric and insipid females of the _settecento._ There is
also a queenly portrait declared to represent Catherine of Siena. I
would prefer to follow those who think it is meant for Sigilgaita.

Small as it is, this place--the church and the abbey--is not one for a
casual visit. Lenormant calls the Trinita a "_Musee epigra-phique"--_so
many are the Latin inscriptions which the monks have worked into its
masonry. They have encrusted the walls with them; and many antiquities
of other kinds have been deposited here since those days. The ruin is
strewn with columns and capitals of fantastic devices; the inevitable
lions, too, repose upon its grassy floor, as well as a pagan altar-stone
that once adorned the neighbouring amphitheatre. One thinks of the
labour expended in raising those prodigious blocks and fitting them
together without mortar in their present positions--they, also, came
from the amphitheatre, and the sturdy letterings engraved on some of
them formed, once upon a time, a sentence that ran round that building,
recording the names of its founders.

Besides the Latin inscriptions, there are Hebrew funereal stones of
great interest, for a colony of Jews was established here between the