Bitonto shares a station with San Spirito, but it lies further away from the railway, and that on the inland side, than most of the towns along this line. Its main interest is found in its cathedral church, which in some points prepares us for the buildings of Bari. First of all in point of wonder, though latest in point of date, is the treatment which it has undergone at the hands of modern improvers. A dim remembrance comes to us that we saw something of the same kind in the Dominican church at Perugia; otherwise we ask in amazement why any man should think it an improvement to cut off the whole upper part of a church as seen inside by thrusting in a roof a great deal lower than the original one, and thereby leaving the upper stages outside to stand up in the air, serving no kind of purpose. Yet this has been done both at Bitonto and at Bari. Yet perchance the improvers of modern times might retort on the original architects, and ask why, when they had made three apses at the east end, they presently built up a wall to hide them. This is the arrangement both at Bitonto and in the two great churches of Bari. The notion of Normans working in Italy would almost seem to have been to make an Italian front at one end, and something approaching to a Norman front at the other end. Thus the church of Bitonto has an excellent west front of Italian outline, with details more Italian than Norman, and with the characteristic round window evidently designed from the beginning, though the one which is actually there must be of later date. Also there either has been or has been meant to be a portico over the lower stage of the west front, a thoroughly Italian notion. But the east end takes almost the form of a Norman west front; a Norman founder, it would seem, was not happy unless he could somewhere or other get two towers with an ornamental wall between them. To this end the apses are sacrificed. Instead of the three curved projections which form the main features of so many Italian, German, and indeed Norman, east ends, the whole east end is flat. The side apses are disguised by towers, one only of which is carried up to any height, while the great apse is hidden by the wall between the towers. Herein is the difference between Bitonto and Trani. At Trani there are no eastern towers, and the apses, though of amazing external height and no less amazing slightness of projection, are still real apses with a real curve. At Bitonto no one could know from the outside that there were any apses at all. As the ordinary ranges of arcades and windows are thus made impossible, the architect, like an English architect some generations later, threw his strength into a single east window, and certainly made one as large and as rich as was possible before the invention of tracery. An elaborate round-headed opening is covered with rich devices, and has wonderful monsters to bear up its side-shafts. This too is to be seen at Trani, and we shall come again to other examples at Bari. There is something very strange in these attempts to reconcile the ideas of Normandy and of Italy in one building. But in these flat east ends the result is that we get something which is certainly neither Italian nor Norman, and which can hardly be approved according to any law of either reality or beauty.