The whole force employed in the construction has an upward tendency, and the spire is the completion of the edifice; for to the spire its countless soaring lines--lines not of stationary strength, but of ascendent growth--converge.

All this the Italians were slow to comprehend.

The campanile, for example, never became an integral part of their buildings.
It stood alone, and was reserved for its original purpose of keeping the bells.

The windows, for a reason very natural in Italy, where there is rather too much than too little sunlight, were curtailed; and instead of the multiplied bays and clustered columns of a northern Gothic aisle, the nave of so vast a church as S.Petronio at Bologna is measured by six arches raised on simple piers.

The facade of an Italian cathedral was studied as a screen, quite independently of its relation to the interior; in the beautiful church of Crema, for example, the moon at night looks through the upper windows of a frontispiece raised far above the low roof of the nave.