THE HOME IN GENOA
It is often hard to know how far back we should go in the ancestry of a
man whose life and character we are trying to reconstruct. The life that
is in him is not his own, but is mysteriously transmitted through the
life of his parents; to the common stock of his family, flesh of their
flesh, bone of their bone, character of their character, he has but added
his own personality. However far back we go in his ancestry, there is
something of him to be traced, could we but trace it; and although it
soon becomes so widely scattered that no separate fraction of it seems to
be recognisable, we know that, generations back, we may come upon some
sympathetic fact, some reservoir of the essence that was him, in which we
can find the source of many of his actions, and the clue, perhaps, to his
character.
In the case of Columbus we are spared this dilemma. The past is reticent
enough about the man himself; and about his ancestors it is almost
silent. We know that he had a father and grandfather, as all grandsons
of Adam have had; but we can be certain of very little more than that.
He came of a race of Italian yeomen inhabiting the Apennine valleys; and
in the vale of Fontanabuona, that runs up into the hills behind Genoa,
the two streams of family from which he sprang were united. His father
from one hamlet, his mother from another; the towering hills behind, the
Mediterranean shining in front; love and marriage in the valley; and a
little boy to come of it whose doings were to shake the world.
His family tree begins for us with his grandfather, Giovanni Colombo of
Terra-Rossa, one of the hamlets in the valley--concerning whom many human
facts may be inferred, but only three are certainly known; that he lived,
begot children, and died. Lived, first at Terra Rossa, and afterwards
upon the sea-shore at Quinto; begot children in number three--Antonio,
Battestina, and Domenico, the father of our Christopher; and died,
because one of the two facts in his history is that in the year 1444 he
was not alive, being referred to in a legal document as quondam, or, as
we should say, “the late.” Of his wife, Christopher’s grandmother, since
she never bought or sold or witnessed anything requiring the record of
legal document, history speaks no word; although doubtless some pleasant
and picturesque old lady, or lady other than pleasant and picturesque,
had place in the experience or imagination of young Christopher. Of the
pair, old Quondam Giovanni alone survives the obliterating drift of
generations, which the shores and brown slopes of Quinto al Mare, where
he sat in the sun and looked about him, have also survived. Doubtless
old Quondam could have told us many things about Domenico, and his
over-sanguine buyings and sellings; have perhaps told us something about
Christopher’s environment, and cleared up our doubts concerning his first
home; but he does not. He will sit in the sun there at Quinto, and sip
his wine, and say his Hail Marys, and watch the sails of the feluccas
leaning over the blue floor of the Mediterranean as long as you please;
but of information about son or family, not a word. He is content to
have survived, and triumphantly twinkles his two dates at us across the
night of time. 1440, alive; 1444, not alive any longer: and so hail and
farewell, Grandfather John.
Of Antonio and Battestina, the uncle and aunt of Columbus, we know next
to nothing. Uncle Antonio inherited the estate of Terra-Rossa, Aunt
Battestina was married in the valley; and so no more of either of them;
except that Antonio, who also married, had sons, cousins of Columbus, who
in after years, when he became famous, made themselves unpleasant, as
poor relations will, by recalling themselves to his remembrance and
suggesting that something might be done for them. I have a belief,
supported by no historical fact or document, that between the families of
Domenico and Antonio there was a mild cousinly feud. I believe they did
not like each other. Domenico, as we shall see presently, was sanguine
and venturesome, a great buyer and seller, a maker of bargains in which
he generally came off second best. Antonio, who settled in Terra-Rossa,
the paternal property, doubtless looked askance at these enterprises from
his vantage-ground of a settled income; doubtless also, on the occasion
of visits exchanged between the two families, he would comment upon the
unfortunate enterprises of his brother; and as the children of both
brothers grew up, they would inherit and exaggerate, as children will,
this settled difference between their respective parents. This, of
course, may be entirely untrue, but I think it possible, and even likely;
for Columbus in after life displayed a very tender regard for members of
his family, but never to our knowledge makes any reference to these
cousins of his, till they send emissaries to him in his hour of triumph.
At any rate, among the influences that surrounded him at Genoa we may
reckon this uncle and aunt and their children--dim ghosts to us, but to
him real people, who walked and spoke, and blinked their eyes and moved
their limbs, like the men and women of our own time. Less of a ghost to
us, though still a very shadowy and doubtful figure, is Domenico himself,
Christopher’s father. He at least is a man in whom we can feel a warm
interest, as the one who actually begat and reared the man of our story.
We shall see him later, and chiefly in difficulties; executing deeds and
leases, and striking a great variety of legal attitudes, to the
witnessing of which various members of his family were called in. Little
enough good did they to him at the time, poor Domenico; but he was a
benefactor to posterity without knowing it, and in these grave notarial
documents preserved almost the only evidence that we have as to the early
days of his illustrious son. A kind, sanguine man, this Domenico, who,
if he failed to make a good deal of money in his various enterprises,
at least had some enjoyment of them, as the man who buys and sells and
strikes legal attitudes in every age desires and has. He was a
wool-carder by trade, but that was not enough for him; he must buy
little bits of estates here and there; must even keep a tavern, where he
and his wife could entertain the foreign sailors and hear the news of
the world; where also, although perhaps they did not guess it, a sharp
pair of ears were also listening, and a pair of round eyes gazing, and
an inquisitive face set in astonishment at the strange tales that went
about.
There is one fragment of fact about this Domenico that greatly enlarges
our knowledge of him. He was a wool-weaver, as we know; he also kept a
tavern, and no doubt justified the adventure on the plea that it would
bring him customers for his woollen cloth; for your buyer and seller
never lacks a reason either for his selling or buying. Presently he is
buying again; this time, still with striking of legal attitudes, calling
together of relations, and accompaniments of crabbed Latin notarial
documents, a piece of ground in the suburbs of Genoa, consisting of scrub
and undergrowth, which cannot have been of any earthly use to him. But
also, according to the documents, there went some old wine-vats with the
land. Domenico, taking a walk after Mass on some feast-day, sees the
land and the wine-vats; thinks dimly but hopefully how old wine-vats, if
of no use to any other human creature, should at least be of use to a
tavern-keeper; hurries back, overpowers the perfunctory objections of his
complaisant wife, and on the morrow of the feast is off to the notary’s
office. We may be sure the wine-vats lay and rotted there, and furnished
no monetary profit to the wool-weaving tavern-keeper; but doubtless they
furnished him a rich profit of another kind when he walked about his
newly-acquired property, and explained what he was going to do with the
wine-vats.
And besides the weaving of wool and pouring of wine and buying and
selling of land, there were more human occupations, which Domenico was
not the man to neglect. He had married, about the year 1450, one
Susanna, a daughter of Giacomo of Fontana-Rossa, a silk weaver who lived
in the hamlet near to Terra-Rossa. Domenico’s father was of the more
consequence of the two, for he had, as well as his home in the valley, a
house at Quinto, where he probably kept a felucca for purposes of trade
with Alexandria and the Islands. Perhaps the young people were married
at Quinto, but if so they did not live there long, moving soon into
Genoa, where Domenico could more conveniently work at his trade. The
wool-weavers at that time lived in a quarter outside the old city walls,
between them and the outer borders of the city, which is now occupied by
the park and public gardens. Here they had their dwellings and
workshops, their schools and institutions, receiving every protection and
encouragement from the Signoria, who recognised the importance of the
wool trade and its allied industries to Genoa. Cloth-weavers,
blanket-makers, silk-weavers, and velvet-makers all lived in this
quarter, and held their houses under the neighbouring abbey of San
Stefano. There are two houses mentioned in documents which seem to have
been in the possession of Domenico at different times. One was in the
suburbs outside the Olive Gate; the other was farther in, by St.
Andrew’s Gate, and quite near to the sea. The house outside the Olive
Gate has disappeared; and it was probably here that our Christopher
first saw the light, and pleased Domenico’s heart with his little cries
and struggles. Neither the day nor even the year is certainly known, but
there is most reason to believe that it was in the year 1451. They must
have moved soon afterwards to the house in the Vico Dritto di
Ponticello, No. 37, in which most of Christopher’s childhood was
certainly passed. This is a house close to St. Andrew’s Gate, which
gate still stands in a beautiful and ruinous condition.
From the new part of Genoa, and from the Via XX Settembre, you turn into
the little Piazza di Ponticello just opposite the church of San Stefano.
In a moment you are in old Genoa, which is to-day in appearance virtually
the same as the place in which Christopher and his little brothers and
sisters made the first steps of their pilgrimage through this world. If
the Italian, sun has been shining fiercely upon you, in the great modern
thoroughfare, you will turn into this quarter of narrow streets and high
houses with grateful relief. The past seems to meet you there; and from
the Piazza, gay with its little provision-shops and fruit stalls, you
walk up the slope of the Vico Dritto di Ponticello, leaving the sunlight
behind you, and entering the narrow street like a traveller entering a
mountain gorge.
It is a very curious street this; I suppose there is no street in the
world that has more character. Genoa invented sky-scrapers long before
Columbus had discovered America, or America had invented steel frames for
high building; but although many of the houses in the Vico Dritto di
Ponticello are seven and eight storeys high, the width of the street from
house-wall to house-wall does not average more than nine feet. The
street is not straight, moreover; it winds a little in its ascent to the
old city wall and St. Andrew’s Gate, so that you do not even see the sky
much as you look forward and upwards. The jutting cornices of the roofs,
often beautifully decorated, come together in a medley of angles and
corners that practically roof the street over; and only here and there do
you see a triangle or a parallelogram of the vivid brilliant blue that is
the sky. Besides being seven or eight storeys high, the houses are the
narrowest in the world; I should think that their average width on the
street front is ten feet. So as you walk up this street where young
Christopher lived you must think of it in these three dimensions towering
slices of houses, ten or twelve feet in width: a street often not more
than eight and seldom more than fifteen feet in width; and the walls of
the houses themselves, painted in every colour, green and pink and grey
and white, and trellised with the inevitable green window-shutters of the
South, standing like cliffs on each side of you seven or eight rooms
high. There being so little horizontal space for the people to live
there, what little there is is most economically used; and all across the
tops of the houses, high above your head, the cliffs are joined by wires
and clothes-lines from which thousands of brightly-dyed garments are
always hanging and fluttering; higher still, where the top storeys of the
houses become merged in roof, there are little patches of garden and
greenery, where geraniums and delicious tangling creepers uphold thus
high above the ground the fertile tradition of earth. You walk slowly up
the paved street. One of its characteristics, which it shares with the
old streets of most Italian towns, is that it is only used by
foot-passengers, being of course too narrow for wheels; and it is paved
across with flagstones from door to door, so that the feet and the
voices echo pleasantly in it, and make a music of their own. Without
exception the ground floor of every house is a shop--the gayest, busiest
most industrious little shops in the world. There are shops for
provisions, where the delightful macaroni lies in its various bins, and
all kinds of frugal and nourishing foods are offered for sale. There
are shops for clothes and dyed finery; there are shops for boots, where
boots hang in festoons like onions outside the window--I have never seen
so many boot-shops at once in my life as I saw in the streets
surrounding the house of Columbus. And every shop that is not a
provision-shop or a clothes-shop or a boot-shop, is a wine-shop--or at
least you would think so, until you remember, after you have walked
through the street, what a lot of other kinds of shops you have seen on
your way. There are shops for newspapers and tobacco, for cheap
jewellery, for brushes, for chairs and tables and articles of wood;
there are shops with great stacks and piles of crockery; there are shops
for cheese and butter and milk--indeed from this one little street in
Genoa you could supply every necessary and every luxury of a humble
life.
As you still go up, the street takes a slight bend; and immediately
before you, you see it spanned by the lofty crumbled arch of St.
Andrew’s Gate, with its two mighty towers one on each side. Just as you
see it you are at Columbus’s house. The number is thirty-seven; it is
like any of the other houses, tall and narrow; and there is a slab built
into the wall above the first storey, on which is written this
inscription:--
NVLLA DOMVS TITVLO DIGNIOR
HEIC
PATERNIS IN AEDIBV
CHRISTOPHORVS COLVMBVS
PVERITIAM
PRIMAMQVE IVVENTAM TRANSEGIT
You stop and look at it; and presently you become conscious of a
difference between it and all the other houses. They are all alert,
busy, noisy, crowded with life in every storey, oozing vitality from
every window; but of all the narrow vertical strips that make up the
houses of the street, this strip numbered thirty-seven is empty, silent,
and dead. The shutters veil its windows; within it is dark, empty of
furniture, and inhabited only by a memory and a spirit. It is a strange
place in which to stand and to think of all that has happened since the
man of our thoughts looked forth from these windows, a common little boy.
The world is very much alive in the Vico Dritto di Ponticello; the little
freshet of life that flows there flows loud and incessant; and yet into
what oceans of death and silence has it not poured since it carried forth
Christopher on its stream! One thinks of the continent of that New World
that he discovered, and all the teeming millions of human lives that have
sprung up and died down, and sprung up again, and spread and increased
there; all the ploughs that have driven into its soil, the harvests that
have ripened, the waving acres and miles of grain that have answered the
call of Spring and Autumn since first the bow of his boat grated on the
shore of Guanahani. And yet of the two scenes this narrow shuttered
house in a bye-street of Genoa is at once the more wonderful and more
credible; for it contains the elements of the other. Walls and floors
and a roof, a place to eat and sleep in, a place to work and found a
family, and give tangible environment to a human soul--there is all human
enterprise and discovery, effort, adventure, and life in that.
If Christopher wanted to go down to the sea he would have to pass under
the Gate of St. Andrew, with the old prison, now pulled down to make room
for the modern buildings, on his right, and go down the Salita del
Prione, which is a continuation of the Vico Dritto di Ponticello. It
slopes downwards from the Gate as the first street sloped upwards to it;
and it contains the same assortment of shops and of houses, the same
mixture of handicrafts and industries, as were seen in the Vico Dritto di
Ponticello. Presently he would come to the Piazza dell’ Erbe, where
there is no grass, but only a pleasant circle of little houses and shops,
with already a smack of the sea in them, chiefly suggested by the shops
of instrument-makers, where to-day there are compasses and sextants and
chronometers. Out of the Piazza you come down the Via di San Donato and
into the Piazza of that name, where for over nine centuries the church of
San Donato has faced the sun and the weather. From there Christopher’s
young feet would follow the winding Via di San Bernato, a street also
inhabited by craftsmen and workers in wood and metal; and at the last
turn of it, a gash of blue between the two cliffwalls of houses, you see
the Mediterranean.
Here, then, between the narrow little house by the Gate and the clamour
and business of the sea-front, our Christopher’s feet carried him daily
during some part of his childish life. What else he did, what he thought
and felt, what little reflections he had, are but matters of conjecture.
Genoa will tell you nothing more. You may walk over the very spot where
he was born; you may unconsciously tread in the track of his vanished
feet; you may wander about the wharves of the city, and see the ships
loading and unloading--different ships, but still trafficking in
commodities not greatly different from those of his day; you may climb
the heights behind Genoa, and look out upon the great curving Gulf from
Porto Fino to where the Cape of the western Riviera dips into the sea;
you may walk along the coast to Savona, where Domenico had one of his
many habitations, where he kept the tavern, and whither Christopher’s
young feet must also have walked; and you may come back and search again
in the harbour, from the old Mole and the Bank of St. George to where the
port and quays stretch away to the medley of sailing-ships and steamers;
but you will not find any sign or trace of Christopher. No echo of the
little voice that shrilled in the narrow street sounds in the Vico
Dritto; the houses stand gaunt and straight, with a brilliant strip of
blue sky between their roofs and the cool street beneath; but they give
you nothing of what you seek. If you see a little figure running towards
you in a blue smock, the head fair-haired, the face blue-eyed and a
little freckled with the strong sunshine, it is not a real figure; it is
a child of your dreams and a ghost of the past. You may chase him while
he runs about the wharves and stumbles over the ropes, but you will never
catch him. He runs before you, zigzagging over the cobbles, up the sunny
street, into the narrow house; out again, running now towards the Duomo,
hiding in the porch of San Stefano, where the weavers held their
meetings; back again along the wharves; surely he is hiding behind that
mooring-post! But you look, and he is not there--nothing but the old
harbour dust that the wind stirs into a little eddy while you look. For
he belongs not to you or me, this child; he is not yet enslaved to the
great purpose, not yet caught up into the machinery of life. His eye has
not yet caught the fire of the sun setting on a western sea; he is still
free and happy, and belongs only to those who love him. Father and
mother, brothers Bartolomeo and Giacomo, sister Biancinetta, aunts,
uncles, and cousins possibly, and possibly for a little while an old
grandmother at Quinto--these were the people to whom that child belonged.
The little life of his first decade, unviolated by documents or history,
lives happily in our dreams, as blank as sunshine.