Identifier: historyofarchit02cumm (find matches)
Title: A history of architecture in Italy from the time of Constantine to the dawn of the renaissance
Year: 1901 (1900s)
Authors: Cummings, Charles Amos, 1833-1905
Subjects: Architecture
Publisher: Boston, New York, Houghton Mifflin and company
Contributing Library: PIMS - University of Toronto
Digitizing Sponsor: University of Toronto

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he hall is unequally divided by a screenof three broad high-stilted pointed arches, perfectly plain, carried onslender columns. A basin occupies the floor of each division.^ The characteristics of this simple but admirable building are withslight modifications the characteristics of all the group of Normancivic buildings to which I have alluded. The earliest of these weretwo pleasure palaces which King Roger II. built about 1120 in theeastern and western suburbs of Palermo, for use in summer andwinter respectively, and of which one known as La Fa vara or Mare-dolce, the winter palace, is still to be seen in a much ruined condi-tion. It was an extensive building, with a frontage of some onehundred and fifty feet, rectangular in plan, and presenting on theexterior the high unbroken walls with a series of tall blind pointed 1 Some twenty miles south of Palermo ; not to be confounded with Cefalii. 2 Mothes, p. 547 ; Gaily Knight, Norman Bemains in Sicily, pi. iv. SICILIAN ARCHITECTURE 115
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Fig. 316. Palermo. Torre della Ninfa. 116 architecturp: in italy arches in three orders without columns or other ornament, whichcharacterize all the buildings of its class. A chapel occupies a por-tion of one side, which shows some interesting and unusual features.It is a rectangle (Fig. 317) scarcely more than sixteen feet wide andthirty-five feet long, three quarters of its length covered by a groinedvault, and terminated by a solid wall, in the middle of which an archopens into a small sanctuary. Of this apartment the centre is cov-ered by a Byzantine dome about nine feet in diameter on a very highdrum, which rises two stages above the vault of the nave and isflanked by a high barrel vault on each side. A ring of sixteen smallwindows surrounds the base of the dome itself. The walls andvaults are quite bare. In a wing of the palace are the ruins of abuilding for vapor-baths, of which the tall chimneys are still stand-ing. The palace stood in the midst of grounds planted with citrons

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