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LESINA, CURZOLA, LISSA
now merely a shell, fast falling to ruin. When the Venetians removed their arsenal to Curzola the prosperity of Lesina departed. The arsenal was built in the sixteenth century, at a cost of 5000 ducats, and was the usual headquarters of the Venetian fleet of thirty galleys, employed in policing and protecting the middle Adriatic.
   The vegetation of Lesina is peculiarly luxuriant. On the walls of Fort Spagnolo are to be found that beautiful shrub, the caper, with its clusters of violet petals and stamens, recalling the golden globes and stamens of the St. John’s wort, sacred to Balder of Scandinavian mythology and to the sun-god of the Greeks. The road along the seashore to the Franciscan monastery, the Madonna delle Grazie, takes us through an extraordinarily rich and subtropical vegetation, quite unlike anything we have hitherto seen in Dalmatia, not even on the Riviera dei sette Castelli, and not to be met with again till we come to Gravosa, and, farther south. Castelnuovo, at the mouth of the Bocche di Cattaro. The monastery approach is flanked by the ordinary chapels or shrines, for the seven stations of the Cross; all were once filled by the usual groups of sculpture, now all but two are used ^ receptacles for fishermen’s nets. The monaster)