Page:Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857.djvu/460

370 Diagram Nos. 238 and 240. Its architecture will be gathered from the several Photogs., &c. It is shattered and shaken to its foundations in every portion, by the violent effort of the earthquake, and presents characteristics of much more formidable dislocation, than the town of Padula did.

All its walls, its vaulted church, and refectory, and very many other grand roofs, the noble groining of its cloisters, and the painted and richly stuccoed ceilings of its library, and of many a royal chamber, are split, fissured, and falling. The light and the rain now find their way through acres of shattered tiling. Innumerable chimneys, obelisks, parapets, vases, bassi-relievi, statues, are thrown down, disfigured or destroyed. Even the internal framing of the heavy-timbered roofs, has been in several places crushed, by the fall of heavy masses from above. Nearly all the superb columnal arcades around its cloistered courts, are bulged at the groining levels, and lean out towards the court. The groining is split along the soffits in almost every gallery except one, where alone iron tye-bars across the arch-chord (originally placed in all), remained, after the French division that was quartered here; a proof of the value of such bars in seismic construction, as well as in the eye of the brigands that pillaged them.

Opposite the front entrance gate of the monastery, at D, (Diagram No. 240,) but at a considerable distance to the south beyond what the diagram admitted, stands a monument to St. Bruno (Photog. No. 225). The general plane of the structure runs east and west almost exactly. Several of the little obelisks and finials upon it, have been twisted from left to right (looking south at it), or in the same