These Venerable Water-Spirits, These Dracs, Are Interesting
Beasts Who Went Through Many Metamorphoses Ere Attaining Their Present
Shape.
Manfredonia lies on a plain sloping very gently seawards - practically
a dead level, and in one of the hottest districts of Italy.
Yet, for
some obscure reason, there is no street along the sea itself; the
cross-roads end in abrupt squalor at the shore. One wonders what
considerations - political, aesthetic or hygienic - prevented the
designers of the town from carrying out its general principles of
construction and building a decent promenade by the waves, where the ten
thousand citizens could take the air in the breathless summer evenings,
instead of being cooped up, as they now are, within stifling hot walls.
The choice of Man-fredonia as a port does not testify to any great
foresight on the part of its founder - peace to his shade! It will for
ever slumber in its bay, while commerce passes beyond its reach; it will
for ever be malarious with the marshes of Sipontum at its edges. But
this particular defect of the place is not Manfred's fault, since the
city was razed to the ground by the Turks in 1620, and then built up
anew; built up, says Lenormant, according to the design of the old city.
Perhaps a fear of other Corsair raids induced the constructors to adhere
to the old plan, by which the place could be more easily defended. Not
much of Man-fredonia seems to have been completed when Pacicchelli's
view (1703) was engraved.
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