In St.Apollinare life still lingers.

Life, flickering in its last spark, like the twinkling of a lamp which the next moment will extinguish, is still there.

Life more suggestive of death, than any utter absence of life could be.
There are some dilapidated remains of conventual buildings on the southern side of the church, mean, and of a date some thousand years subsequent to that of the Basilica.

They are nearly ruinous, but are still--or were till within a few years--inhabited by one Capucin friar, and one lay brother of the order, whose duty it was to mutter a mass, with ague-chattering jaws, at the high altar, and act as guardians of the building.
Small guardianship is needed.

The huge ancient doors--made of planks from vine trunks which grew fifteen hundred years ago on the Bosphorus--are never closed; probably because their weight would defy the efforts of the two poor old friars, to whom the keeping of the building is committed, to move them.