Page:Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857.djvu/380

302 Palazzo Palmieri, situated not far from the bridge over the Calore, and nearly on the level of the plain. The west front of the house (i.e. looking eastward) is seen in Photog. No. 176 (Coll. Roy. Soc.), the central building in the picture, and to the left of it is the Capella Palmieri, forming a connected building with the palazzo, and with its west end ranging with the front of the latter.

In Diagram No. 175, Fig. a, is a sketch elevation of this west front and block plan of the building. The house is exactly cardinal; it is large, comparatively new, and tolerably well built, though of short lumpy stone, with much cut limestone about the quoins and jambs, &c. It consists of a central court, surrounded by buildings of two stories and an attic, beneath the tiled roof. It is built upon the solid limestone rock, which at this point rises up through the deep alluvium, that lies around it at every side for a considerable distance. The ground is level around it except on the south, where it slopes off rather rapidly, the rock disappearing beneath the alluvium. It is, in fact, built upon the top of a sort of low pinnacle of limestone rock, that comes up (like many others round the borders of the great plain) to its level, through the deep alluvium, so that it stands as it were on the top of a little subterranean "colline," like a rock in an ocean of earth. The beds of the limestone here, as generally throughout the Vallone, are almost vertical, or at extremely sharp dip, and tend to a general east and west direction of strike.

The nearest rock, upon the same level, appears again at about 200 yards above the bridge, where are those singular and picturesque "swallow holes" into and through which, a portion of the waters of the Calore disappear, to