III. MURANO 59

the church had been brought from the mainland. One bears an inscription, which, as its antiquity is confirmed by the shapelessness of its letters, I was much gratified by not being able to read; but M. Lazari, the intelligent author of the latest and best Venetian guide,¹ with better skill, has given as much of it as remains, thus:-

I have printed the letters as they are placed in the inscription, in order that the reader may form some idea of the difficulty of reading such legends when the letters, thus thrown into one heap, are themselves of strange forms, and half worn away; any gaps which at all occur between them, coming in the wrong places. There is no doubt, however, as to the reading of this fragment:-“T ... Sancte Marie Domini Genetricis et beati Estefani martiri ego indignus et peccator Domenicus T.” On these two initial and final Ts, expanding one into Templum, the other into Torcellanus, M. Lazari founds an ingenious conjecture that the inscription records the elevation of the church under a certain bishop Dominic of Torcello (named in the Altinate chronicle), who flourished in the middle of the ninth century. If this were so, as the inscription occurs broken off on a fragment inserted scornfully in the present edifice, this edifice must be of the twelfth century, worked with fragments taken from the ruins of that built in the ninth. The two Ts are, however, hardly a foundation large enough to build the church upon, a hundred years before the date assigned to it both by history and tradition (see above, § 8); and the reader has yet to be made aware of the principal fact bearing on the question.

§ 31. Above the first story of the apse runs, as he knows already, a gallery under open arches, protected by a light

¹ [Guida Artistica e Storica di Venezia ... autori P. Selvatico e V. Lazari, Venezia, 1852.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]