Genoa

“ I lingered among the attractions of Genoa for a few days. I enjoy not only those magnificent palaces with their spacious quadrangles, broad staircases, and sculptured façades, but those narrow, winding streets of which three quarters of the city are composed—so narrow indeed that a carriage never is seen in them, and a donkey, pannier-laden, after the manner of Ali Baba's faithful animal, compels you to keep very close to the buildings. Genoa is the very reverse of Philadelphia. Its streets are as narrow and crooked as those of Philadelphia are broad and straight. ”

“ Look down on Genoa, with its fantasia of spires, campaniles, roof-gardens, green lattices, marble balconies, chimneys decorated with figures of doges and opening out like flowers, and see how the old narrow alleys are almost roofed with telegraph and telephone wires. Go down to the widened harbour and see the warehouses, the American sky-scrapers, the smoking chimneys, the great steamers sailing out for Buenos Ayres and New York, the emigrants with their bundles. The blue bird sings here no more; you hear only the bang of the hammer, which Young Italy declares is the voice of the century. ”

“ There is but little to see, you may think,—little enough but just life. For Genoa is not a museum: she lives, and the laughter of her children is the greatest of all the joyful poems of Italy, maybe the only one that is immortal.
With this thought in your heart (as it is sure to be everywhere in Italy) you return (as one continually does) to the Arcades, and turning to the left you follow them till you come to Via S. Lorenzo, in which is the Duomo all of white and black marble, a jewel with mystery in its heart, hidden away among the houses of life. ”

“ The coup-d'œil of Genoa, splendid as it is, is not equal to that of Naples, even setting poetical associations aside: it is built like a crescent round the harbour, rising abruptly from the margin of the water, which makes the view from the sea so beautiful: to the north the hills enclose it round like an amphitheatre. The adjacent country is covered with villas, gardens, vineyards, woods, and olive-groves forming a scene most enchanting to the eye and mind, though of a character very different from the savage luxuriance of the south of Italy. ”

“ Thy Bertha will despair.
VERRINA. Who spoke those words? Genoese, to arms!
FIESCO. Think on the means of forwarding our plan. Night has advanced upon our discourse; Genoa is wrapped in sleep; the tyrant sinks exhausted beneath the sins of the day. Let us watch o'er both.
BOURGOGNINO. Let us, before we part, consecrate our heroic union by an embrace! (They form a circle, with joined arms.) Here unite five of the bravest hearts in Genoa to decide their country's fate. (All embrace eagerly.) ”

“ Genoa, a more popular and more turbulent republic, subsisted only by her fleet and her commerce. Hemmed in between barren mountains and a gulf without a shore, it was only a port peopled by sailors. The marble palaces, built one above the other on the rocky banks, looked down on the sea, their sole territory. The portraits of the doges and the statue of Andreà Doria constantly reminded the Genoese that from the waves had proceeded their riches and their renown, and that there alone they could hope to look for them. ”

“ After the creamy and rosy tints of those daughters of climate along the Riviera, it was pleasant to find a many-centuried mother of commerce like Genoa of the dignified gray which she wears to the eye, whether it looks down on her from the heights above her port or up at her from the thickly masted and thickly funnelled waters of the harbor. Most European towns have red tiled roofs, which one gets rather tired of putting into one's word paintings, but the roofs of Genoa are gray tiled, and gray are her serried house walls, and gray her many churches and bell-towers. ”

“ What Philip of Spain did for God's sake, what Visconti did for power, what Cesare Borgia did for glory, Genoa has done for gold. She is a merchant adventurer. Her true work was the Bank of St. George. One of the most glorious and splendid cities of Italy, she is, almost alone in that home of humanism, without a school of art or a poet or even a philosopher. Her heroes are the great admirals, and adventurers—Spinola, Doria, Grimaldi, Fieschi, men whose names linger in many a ruined castle along the coast who of old met piracy with piracy. ”

“ Genoa, Gênes, Genova, as it is called in English, French, and Italian, derives its name from the Latin word genu, the knee, supposed to be the shape of the large inlet of the sea around which the land lies in a vast semicircle. It is also called "La Superba," from its magnificent situation; indeed, few cities equal its imposing grandeur as seen from the sea. Handsome buildings line the shore for about the length of two miles; splendid palaces, churches, and convents rise tier upon tier on the steep sides of the hills, whose barren summits are crowned by formidable-looking forts and ramparts. ”

“ A kind of fat commercial dulness, a lack of that personal distinction which justifies magnificence, seemed to Odo the prevailing note of the place; nor was he sorry when his packet set sail for Naples.
Here indeed he found all the vivacity that Genoa lacked. Few cities could at first acquaintance be more engaging to the stranger. Dull and brown as it appeared after the rich tints of Genoa, yet so gloriously did sea and land embrace it, so lavishly the sun gild and the moon silver it, that it seemed steeped in the surrounding hues of nature. ”

“ If it's very well meanwhile to come to Turin first it's better still to go to Genoa afterwards. Genoa is the tightest topographic tangle in the world, which even a second visit helps you little to straighten out. In the wonderful crooked, twisting, climbing, soaring, burrowing Genoese alleys the traveller is really up to his neck in the old Italian sketchability. ”

“ Genoa looks most picturesquely from the sea, at the foot of a sheltering semicircle of lofty hills; and as we lay in the harbor we saw, among other interesting objects, the great Doria Palace, with its gardens, and the cathedral, and a heap and sweep of stately edifices, with the mountains looking down upon he city, and crowned with fortresses. The variety of hue in the houses, white, green, pink, and orange, was very remarkable. ”

“ The ear-splitting cries of hawkers hasten one's footsteps down the steep descents, and one dodges out of their way only to lose oneself in vain attempts to leave the picturesque but squalid quarters of old Genoa.
However fascinating these slums may be—and they can hold their own from the painter's point of view with those in any other Mediterranean port—it must be acknowledged that the palaces for which Genoa is justly famous have hardly a rival. Historically the most interesting is the Palazzo di S. Giorgio, which stands close to the quayside at the east end of the Piazza Caricamento. ”

“ Here poverty and riches jostle one another side by side as they do in life, and are antagonistic and hate one another. Yet Genoa, alone of all the cities of Italy proper is living to-day, living the life of to-day, and with all her glorious past she is as much a city of the twentieth century as of any other period of history. For, while others have gone after dreams and attained them and passed away, she has clung to life, and the god of this world was ever hers. ”

“ I can not conceive of such a thing as Genoa in ruins. Such massive arches, such ponderous substructions as support these towering broad-winged edifices, we have seldom seen before; and surely the great blocks of stone of which these edifices are built can never decay; walls that are as thick as an ordinary American doorway is high cannot crumble.
The republics of Genoa and Pisa were very powerful in the Middle Ages. Their ships filled the Mediterranean, and they carried on an extensive commerce with Constantinople and Syria. ”

“ But the crowning glory of Genoa is its Campo Santo or Holy Field, where the noble families of Genoa bury their dead. Imagine vast arcades surrounding an open space of several acres and these arcades crowded with wonderfully beautiful statues. Each family pays a sum (no small one) for a niche in one of these arcades with the accompanying vault beneath and then erects a life-size statue of the departed, or some symbolical figure. ”

“ A very great number of the streets in Genoa are footways merely, and these are as narrow, as dark, as full of jutting chimney-places, balconies, and opened window-shutters, and as picturesque as the little alleys in Venice. They wander at will around the bases of the gloomy old stone palaces, and seem to have a vagabond fondness for creeping down to the port, and losing themselves there in a certain cavernous arcade which curves round the water with the flection of the shore, and makes itself a twilight at noonday. ”

“ The noble bay of Genoa, with the deep blue Mediterranean, lie stretched out near at hand; monstrous old desolate houses and palaces are dotted all about; lofty hills, with their tops often hidden in the clouds, and with strong forts perched high up on their craggy sides, are close upon the left ”

“ From the roofs where they seem to live, from the high narrow windows, the warren of houses that would be hovels in the North, but here in the sun are picturesque, women look down lazily and cry out, with a shrillness peculiar to Genoa, to their friends in the street. ”

“ Genoa devotes a street, a square, and a bronze statue to Bixio, the Boanerges of the epic; Viareggio has just put up a tablet to Rosolino Pilo and Giovanni Corrao, the daring precursors of the Thousand; even Rubattino—patriot in his own despite—has his statue in Genoa harbour, on the false ground that he put his shipping line at Garibaldi’s disposal. ’Tis a very shower of stones, falling on the just and the unjust alike. And sometimes—as at Asti—all the Heroes are United beneath a riot of granite monoliths and marble lions. ”

“ What may we not expect from the fury of the wounded boar!
FIESCO (laughing) . The blind, unwieldy monster, which at first rattles its heavy bones, threatening, with gaping jaws, to devour the high and low, the near and distant, at last stumbles at a thread—Genoese, 'tis in vain! The epoch of the masters of the sea is past—Genoa is sunk beneath the splendor of its name. Its state is such as once was Rome's, when, like a tennis-ball, she leaped into the racket of young Octavius. Genoa can be free no longer; Genoa must be fostered by a monarch; therefore do homage to the mad-brained Gianettino. ”

“ He himself as Lord of Genoa gave her back her liberties, set up the Senate again, opened the Golden Book, Il Libro d'Oro, and wrote in it the names of those who should rule; then he set up a parliament, the Grand Council of Four Hundred, and the old quarrels were forgotten, and there was peace.
But who could rule the Genoese, greedy as their sea, treacherous as their winds, proud as their sun, deep as their sky, cruel as their rocks! If the Admiral had brought the Adorni and the Fregosi low, there yet remained the Fieschi, old as the Doria, Guelph too, while they had been Ghibelline. ”

“ But it is not fair to speak as if at Genoa there were nothing but low-life to be seen, for the place is the residence of some of the grandest people in the world. Nor are all the palaces ranged upon dusky alleys; the handsomest and most impressive form a splendid series on each side of a couple of very proper streets, in which there is plenty of room for a coach-and-four to approach the big doorways. Many of these doorways are open, revealing great marble staircases with couchant lions for balustrades and ceremonious courts surrounded by walls of sun-softened yellow. ”

“ We linger over all that leads up to the momentous start westwards: we recall his birth and early life at Genoa towards the middle of the fifteenth century, his apprenticeship to his father as a weaver of cloth, his devotion to the sea, his love of the little sailing ships that passed in and out of the busy Genoese harbour from all parts of the known world. ”

“ Many old families here, are dissatisfied with the annexation of Genoa to Piedmont, and dream of yet making the city and its territory an independent republic; dream of the grandeur of ancient times, without comprehending that of the present age, and without comprehending—like the English aristocracy—how to become great by actively taking part in its development. The Genoese princes built up their palaces and marble villas, and look with displeased glance on the decreased obeisance of the working class and the peasants, to their excellencies. ”

“ They press upon us and contend with us, and are beautiful and again ugly and mediocre and heroic, all between two heart beats; but the dead ask only our love. Genoa has never asked it, and never will. She is one of us, her future is hidden from her, and into her mystery none has dared to look. She is like a symphony of modern music, full of immense gradual crescendos, gradual diminuendos, unknown to the old masters. Only Rome, and that but seldom, breathes with her life. ”

“ The midnight silence of the sleeping city, interrupted only by the distant sounds of watchmen, by the low hoarse murmur of the sea, or the stealthy footsteps and disguised voice of Fiesco, is conveyed to our imagination by some brief but graphic touches; we seem to stand in the solitude and deep stillness of Genoa, awaiting the signal which is to burst so fearfully upon its slumber. ”

“ In a Word, the great Houses of Genoa are mere Solitudes, excepting on Assembly Days, of which there are some held here every Evening at the House of one Nobleman or another. Then the Apartments are nobly illuminated, and there’s all manner of Refreshments serv’d up in Profusion. Assemblies of this kind, and a sorry Italian Opera, were all the Pleasures at Genoa while I was there; so that a Stranger does not know what to do here with his Time. ”