"Such was the Palace of Diocletian; what now remains of the edifice? The shell or outer wall, of which the best preserved part is the grand gallery facing the sea; for Spalato like its contemporary Baalbec being used as a fortification, the rough stone and mortar of the middle-age battlements surmount in many places the massive normal masonry of the Roman Empire.... Within the town, fragments of Roman architecture are scattered thickly enough, but so obscured and mingled with modern houses as to present a mass of confusion."
Did we stop short here, the reader might well imagine that beyond the shell, the walls which surrounded the palace, nothing has been preserved; such however is not the case, and I shall now endeavour to describe what I saw in Spalato the morning that I steamed into its harbour, when from the deck of my vessel I gazed on that sea studded all over with numberless boats spreading the most fantastic sails to the gentlest of breezes!
The prevailing form, if not the only one, was the lateen in all its varieties, most of the boats carrying but one. But such colours and such devices painted on them! things that would look simply outrageous at Cowes or Ryde, how lovely they seemed there! Some were striped from above downwards with every colour of the rainbow, but only two colours to each sail and these always harmoniously contrasted; others of one uniform colour, with some fantastic ornament in sharp contrast in the middle; while some, all of one colour had at the topmost angle of the lateen a representation of the sun generally in burnished gold with its rays coming down a long way over the sail. The glittering golden sea, those fairy-looking boats gliding over it, the picturesque costumes of the sailors, the whole scene bathed in that golden light was a fit preparation for my introduction to the rare beauties of Spalato itself.
As we slowly approached the quay, there was ample time to admire the long façade of Diocletian's Palace, with the tall and elegant campanile which rises inside it on the right, and the strong hexagonal machicolated tower on the left. The lofty steeple on the right, a very Giralda of elegance and airiness—the dungeon on the left a sturdy emblem of the iron-fisted middle ages.