There is an old saying, probably as old as Genoa's first loot of her
step-sister republic, “If you want to see Pisa, you must go to Genoa,”
which may have obscurely governed us in our purpose of stopping there on
our way up out of Italy. We could not have too much of Pisa, as
apparently the Genoese could not; but before our journey ended I decided
that they would have thought twice before plundering Pisa if they had
been forced to make their forays by means of the present railroad
connection between the two cities. At least there would have been but
one of the many wars of murder and rapine between the republics, and
that would have been the first. After a single experience of the eighty
tunnels on that line, with the perpetually recurring necessity of
putting down and putting up the car-window, no army would have repeated
the invasion; and, though we might now be without that satirical old
saying, mankind would, on the whole, have been the gainer. As it was,
the enemies could luxuriously go and come in their galleys and enjoy the
fresh sea-breezes both ways, instead of stifling in the dark and gasping
for breath as they came into the light, while their train ran in and out
under the serried peaks that form the Mediterranean shore. I myself
wished to take a galley from Leghorn, or even a small steamer, but I was
overruled by less hardy but more obdurate spirits, and so we took the
Florentine express at Pisa, where we changed cars.
The Italian government had providently arranged that the car we changed
into should be standing beyond the station in the dash of an unexpected
shower, and that it should be provided with steps so high and steep,
with Italian ladies standing all over them and sticking their umbrellas
into the faces of American citizens trying to get in after them, that it
was a feat of something like mountain-climbing to reach the corridor,
and then of daring-do to secure a compartment. Though a collectivist,
with a firm belief in the government ownership of railroads everywhere,
I might have been tempted at times in Italy to abjure my creed if I had
not always reflected that the state there had just come into possession
of the roads, with all their capitalistic faults of management and
outwear of equipment which it would doubtless soon reform and repair. I
venture to suggest now, however, that its prime duty is to have
platforms level with the car-doors, as they are in England, and not to
let Italian ladies stand in the doorways with their umbrellas. I do not
insist that it shall impose silence and sobriety upon a party of young
French people in the next compartment, but I do think it should remove
those mountains back from the sea so that the trains carrying cultivated
Americans can run along the open shore the whole way to Genoa. Pending
this, it should provide strong and watchful employees to lower and raise
the windows at the mouth of each of the eighty tunnels in every car. I
do not demand that it shall change the site of the station in Genoa so
that it shall not always be the city's whole length away from the hotel
you have chosen, but I think this would be a desirable improvement,
especially if it is after dark when you arrive and raining a peculiarly
cold, disagreeable rain.
That rain was very disappointing; for, in the intervals between tunnels,
we had fancied, from the few brief glimpses we caught of the landscape,
that the April so backward elsewhere in Italy was forwarder in the
blossomed trees along the eastern Riviera; and we learned at our hotel
that the steam-heat had just been taken off because the day had been so
hot and dry, though the evening was now so cold and wet. It was fitfully
put on and off during the chilly week that ensued, though in our
fifth-story garden, to which we sometimes resorted, there was a mildness
in the air that was absent in-doors. The hotel itself was disappointing;
any hotel would be after our hotel in Leghorn; and, though there was the
good-will of former days, there was not the former effect. The corridors
crashed and clattered all day long and well into the night with the
gayety of some cheap incursion of German tourists, who seemed, indeed,
to fill the whole city with their clamor. They were given a long table
to themselves, and when they were set at it and began to ply their
knives and tongues the din was deafening. That would not have been so
bad if they had not been so plain, or if, when they happened, in a young
girl or two, to be pretty, they had not guttled and guzzled so like the
plainest of their number. One such pretty girl was really beautiful,
with a bloom perhaps already too rich, which, as she abandoned herself
to her meat and drink, reddened downward over her lily neck and upward
to her golden hair, past the brows under which her blue, blue eyes
protruded painfully, all in a frightful prophecy of what she would be
when the bud of her spring should be the full-blown cabbage-rose of her
summer.
I dare say those people were not typical of their civilization. Probably
modern enterprise makes travel easy to sorts and conditions of Germans
who once would not have dreamed of leaving home, and now tempts these
rude Teutonic hordes over or under the Alps and pours them out on the
Peninsula, far out-deluging the once-prevalent Anglo-Saxons. The first
night there was an Englishman at dinner, but he vanished after
breakfast; the next day an Italian officer was at lunch, but he came no
more; we were the only Americans, and now we had the sole society of
those German tourists. Perhaps it was national vanity, but I could not
at the moment think of an equal number of our fellow-citizens of any
condition who would not have been less molestively happy. One forgot
what one was eating, and left the table bruised as if physically beaten
upon by those sound-waves and sight-waves. But our companions must have
made themselves acceptable to the city they had come to visit; Genoa is
very noisy, and they could not be heard above the trams and omnibuses,
and in the streets they could not be seen at table; when I ventured to
note to a sacristan, here and there, that there seemed to be a great
many Germans in town, the fact apparently roused nothing of the old-time
Italian antipathy for the Tedeschi. Severally they may have been
cultivated and interesting people; and that blooming maiden may really
have been the Blue Flower of Romance that she looked before she began to
dine.
[Illustration: 49 WASHING IN THE RIVER, GENOA]
We were entering upon our third view of Genoa with the zest of our
first, and I was glad to find there were so many things I had left
unseen or had forgotten. First of all the Campo Santo allured me, and I
went at once to verify the impressions of former years in a tram
following the bed of a torrential river which was now dry except in the
pools where the laundresses were at work, picturesquely as always in
Italy. But here they were not alone the worthy theme of art; their
husbands and fathers, and perhaps even their _fiances,_ were at work
with them, not, indeed, washing the linen, but spreading to dry it in
snowy spaces over the clean gravel. On either bank of the stream newly
finished or partly finished apartment-houses testified to the prosperity
of the city, which seemed to be growing everywhere, and it would not be
too bold to imagine this a favorite quarter because of its convenience
to the Cam-po Santo. Already in the early forenoon our train was
carrying people to that popular resort, who seemed to be intending to
spend the day there. Some had wreaths and flowers, and were clearly
sorrowing friends of the dead; others, with their guide-books, were as
plainly mere sight-seers, and these were Italians as well as strangers,
gratifying what seems the universal passion for cemeteries. In our own
villages the graveyards are the favorite Sunday haunt of the young
people and the scene of their love-making; and it has been the complaint
of English visitors to our cities that the first thing their hosts took
them to see was the cemetery. They did not realize that this was often
the thing best worth showing them, for our feeble aesthetic instincts
found their first expression in the attempt to dignify or beautify the
homes of the dead. Each mourner grieved in marble as fitly as he knew
how, and, if there was sometimes a rivalry in vaults and shafts, the
effect was of a collective interest which all could feel. Sometimes it
was touching, sometimes it was revolting; and in Italy it is not
otherwise. The Campo Santo of San Miniato at Florence, the Campo Santo
at Bologna, the Campo Santo wherever else you find it, you find of one
quality with the Campo Santo at Genoa. It makes you the helpless
confidant of family pride, of bruised and lacerated love, of fond
aspiration, of religious longing, of striving faith, of foolish vanity
and vulgar pretence, but, if the traveller would read the local
civilization aright, he cannot do better than go to study it there.
My third experience of the Genoese Campo Santo was different only in
quantity from the first and second. There seemed more of the things,
better and worse, but the increasing witness was of the art which
rendered the fact with unsparing realism, sometimes alloyed with
allegory and sometimes not, but always outright, literal, strong, rank.
The hundreds of groups, reliefs, statues, busts; the long aisles where
the dead are sealed in the tableted shelves of the wall, like the dead
in the catacombs, the ample space of open ground enclosed by the
cloisters and set thick with white crosses, are all dominated by a
colossal Christ which, in my fancy, remains of very significant effect.
It is as if no presence less mighty and impressive could centre in
itself the multitudinous passions, wills, and hopes expressed in those
incongruous monuments and reduce them to that unity of meaning which one
cannot deny them.
[Illustration: 50 REALISTIC GROUP IN THE CAMPO SANTO]
The Campo Santo of Genoa is a mortuary gloss of Genoese history: of the
long succession of civic strifes and foreign wars common to all the
Italian republics, now pacified at last by a spirit of unity, of
brotherhood. At Genoa, more than anywhere else in Italy except Milan,
you are aware of the North--its strenuousness, its enterprise, its
restless outstretching for worlds beyond itself. Columbus came with the
gift of a New World in his hand, and, in the fulness of time, Mazzini
came with the gift of a Newer World in his hand: the realization of
Christ in the ideal of duties without which the old ideal of rights is
heathen and helpless. Against the rude force of Genoa, the aristocratic
beauty of such a place as Pisa was nothing; only Florence and Venice
might vie with her. But she had not the inspiration of Florence, her
art, her literature; the dialect in which she uttered herself is harsh
and crabbed, and no poet known beyond it has breathed his soul into it;
her architecture was first the Gothic from over the Alps, and then of
the Renaissance which built the palaces of her merchants in a giant bulk
and of a brutal grandeur. She had not the political genius of Venice,
the oligarchic instinct of self-preservation from popular misgovernment
and princely aggression. Her story is the usual Italian story of a
people jealous of each other, and, in their fear of a native tyrant,
impatiently calling in one foreign tyrant after another and then
furiously expelling him. When she would govern herself, she first made
her elective chief magistrate Doge for life, and then for two years;
under both forms she submitted and rebelled at will from 1359 till 1802,
when, after having accepted the French notion of freedom from Bonaparte,
she enjoyed a lion's share of his vicissitudes. For a hundred years
before that the warring powers had fought over her in their various
quarrels about successions, and she ought to have been well inured to
suffering when, in 1800, the English and the Austrians besieged her
French garrison, and twenty thousand of her people starved in a cause
not their own. The English restored the Doges, and the Republic of Genoa
fell at last nineteen years after the Republic of Venice and three
hundred years after the Republic of Florence. She was given to Piedmont
in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna, and she has formed part of Italy ever
since the unification. I believe that now she is of rather radical
opinions in politics, though the bookseller who found on his shelves a
last copy of the interesting sketch of Genoese history which I have
profited by so little, said that the Genoese had been disappointed in
the Socialists, lately in power, and were now voting Clerical by a large
majority.
The fact may have been colored by the book-seller's feelings. If the
Clericals are in superior force, the clerics are not: nowhere in Italy
did I see so few priests. All other orders of people throng the narrow,
noisy, lofty streets, where the crash of feet and hoofs and wheels beats
to the topmost stories of the palaces towering overhead in their stony
grandiosity. Everywhere in the structures dating after the Gothic period
there is want of sensibility; the art of the Renaissance was not moulded
here in the moods of a refined and effeminate patriciate, such as in
Venice tempered it to beauty; but it renders in marble the prepotence of
a commercialized nobility, and makes good in that form the right of the
city to be called Genoa the Proud. Perhaps she would not wish to be
called proud because of these palaces alone. It is imaginable that she
would like the stranger to remember the magnificence with which she
rewarded the patriotism of her greatest citizen after Columbus and
Mazzini: that mighty admiral, Andrea Doria, who freed this country first
from the rule of Charles V. and then from the rule of Francis I.; who
swept the Barbary corsairs from the seas; who beat the Turks in battles
on ship and on shore; who took Corsica from the French when he was
eighty-eight years old; who suffered from civil faction; who outlived
exile as he had outlived war, and who died at the age of ninety-four,
after he had refused the sovereignty of the country he had served so
long; who was the Washington of his day, and was equally statesman and
soldier, and, above all, patriot. It is his portrait that you see in
that old palace (called the Palace of the Prince because Charles V. had
called him Prince) overlooking the port, where he sits an old, old man,
very weary, in the sole society of his sarcastic cat, as I have noted
before. The cat seems to have just passed some ironical reflection on
the vanity of human things and to be studying him for the effect. Both
appear indifferent to the spectator, but perhaps they are not, and you
must not for all that fail of a visit to the Church of San Matteo, set
round with the palaces of the Doria family--the palace which his
grateful country gave the Admiral after he refused to be her master, and
the palaces of his kindred neighboring it round.
I do not remember any equal space in all Europe which, through a very
little knowledge, so takes the heart as the gentle little church founded
by an earlier Doria, and, after four hundred years, restored by a later,
and then environed with the stately homes of the race, where they could
be domesticated in the honor and reverence of their countrymen because
of the goodness and greatness of the loftiest of their line. It is such
a place as one may revere and yet possess one's soul in self-respect,
very much as one may revere Mount Vernon. The church, as well as the
piazza, is full of Dorian memories, and the cloister must be visited not
only for its rather damp beauty, but for the full meaning of the irony
which Doria's cat in the portrait wished to convey: against the wall
here are gathered the fragments of the statue of Doria which, when the
French Revolution came to Genoa, the patriots threw out of the ducal
palace and broke in the street below.
We were some time in finding our way into the magnificent hall of the
Great Council where this statue once stood, with the statues of many
other Genoese heroes and statesmen, and I am not sure that it was worth
all our trouble. Magnificent it certainly was, but coarsely magnificent,
like so much elsewhere in Genoa; but, if we had been at ten times the
trouble we were in seeing the Palace of the Municipality, I should not
think it too much. There in the great hall are the monuments of those
Genoese notables whose munificence their country wished to remember in
the order of their generosity. I do not remember just what the maximum
was, but the Doge or other leading citizen who gave, say, twenty-five
thousand ducats to the state had a statue erected to him; one who gave
fifteen, a bust; and one who gave five, an honorary tablet. The
surprising thing is that nearly all the statues and busts, whether good
likenesses or not, are delightful art: it is as if the noble acts of the
benefactors of their country had inspired the sculptors to reproduce
them not only in true character, but in due dignity. To the American who
views them and remembers that we have now so much money that some of us
do not know what to do with it, they will suggest that our millionaires
have an unrivalled opportunity of immortality in the same sort. There is
hardly a town of ten thousand inhabitants in the country where there are
not men who could easily afford to give a hundred thousand dollars, or
fifty, or twenty to their native or adoptive place and so enter upon a
new life in bronze or marble. This would enrich us beyond the dreams of
avarice in a high-grade portrait statuary; it would give work to
hundreds of sculptors who now have little or nothing to do, and would
revive or create the supplementary industries of casting in metal or
carving in stone.
The time was in Genoa, it seems, as the time is now with us, when a
great many people did not know what to do with their money. There were
sumptuary laws which forbade their spending it, either they or their
wives or daughters, in dress; apparently they could not even wear Genoa
velvet, which had to be sold abroad for the corruption of the outside
world; and this is said to be the reason why there were so many palaces
built in Genoa in the days of the republic. People who did not wish to
figure in that hall of fame put their surplus into the immense and often
ugly edifices which we still see ministering to their pride in the wide
and narrow streets of the city. Now and then a devout family built or
rebuilt a church and gave it to the public; but by far the greater
number put up palaces, where, after the house-warming, they dwelt in a
cold and economical seclusion. Some of their palaces are now devoted to
public uses; they are galleries of pictures and statues most worthy to
be seen, or they are municipal offices, or museums, or schools of art or
science; but part are still in the keeping of the families that
contributed them to the splendor of their city. The streets in which
they stand are loud with transit and traffic, but the palaces hold aloof
from the turmoil and lift their lofty heads to the level of the gardens
behind them. Huge, heavy they are, according to the local ideal, and
always wanting the delicacy of Venetian architecture, where something in
the native genius tempered to gentleness the cold severity of Palladio,
and where Sansovino knew how to bridge the gulf between the Gothic and
the Renascent art that would have been Greek but halted at being Roman.
The grandeur of those streets of palaces in Genoa cannot be denied, but
perhaps, if the visitor quite consulted his preference or indulged his
humor, he would wander rather through the arcades of the busy port, up
the chasmal alleys of little shops into the tiny piazzas, no bigger than
a good-sized room, opening before some ancient church and packed with
busy, noisy people. The perspective there is often like the perspective
in old Naples, but the uproar in Genoa does not break in music as it
does in Naples, and the chill lingering in the sunless depths of those
chasms is the cold of a winter that begins earlier and a spring that
loiters later than the genial seasons of the South.