Its peculiarity consists in columns with foliated capitals modelled after the acanthus leaf, and still greater height, about ten diameters, surmounted with a more ornamented entablature.

Giustinian drew it from its sheath, displaying a blade exquisitely damascened with acanthus foliage, as he turned to his son.

Some time about the middle of the thirteenth century, it had been a favorite enterprise of a princess of a royal family in Naples to erect a convent to Saint Agnes, the guardian of female purity, out of the wrecks and remains of an ancient temple of Venus, whose white pillars and graceful acanthus-leaves once crowned a portion of the precipice on which the town was built, and were reflected from the glassy blue of the sea at its feet.

The whole was in the style of the early part of this century, modified by the bad taste of the Second Empire, with much gilded carving about the doors and the corners of the big panels in which the damask was stretched, while the low, vaulted ceiling was a mass of gilt stucco, modelled in heavy acanthus leaves and arabesques, from the centre of which hung a chandelier of white Venetian glass.