II

If it is very well to come to Turin first, it is still better to go to

Genoa afterwards. Genoa is the queerest place in the world, and even a

second visit helps you little to straighten it 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 is, I believe, a port of great capacity, and the bequest of the

late Duke of Galliera, who left four millions of dollars for the purpose

of improving and enlarging it, will doubtless do much toward converting

it into one of the great commercial stations of Europe. But as, after

leaving my hotel the afternoon I arrived, I wandered for a long time at

hazard through the tortuous byways of the city, I said to myself, not

without an accent of private triumph, that here was something it would

be almost impossible to modernise. I had found my hotel, in the first

place, extremely entertaining--the Croce di Malta, as it was called,

established in a gigantic palace on the edge of the swarming and not

over-clean harbour. It was the biggest house I had ever entered, and the

basement alone would have contained a dozen American caravansaries. I

met an American gentleman in the vestibule who (as he had indeed a

perfect right to be) was annoyed by its troublesome dimensions--one was

a quarter of an hour ascending out of the basement--and desired to know

whether it was a "fair sample" of the Genoese inns. It appeared to be an

excellent specimen of Genoese architecture generally; so far as I

observed, there were few houses perceptibly smaller than this Titanic

tavern. I lunched in a dusky ballroom, whose ceiling was vaulted,

frescoed and gilded with the fatal facility of a couple of centuries

ago, and which looked out upon another ancient house-front, equally huge

and equally battered, from which it was separated only by a little wedge

of dusky space (one of the principal streets, I believe, of Genoa), out

of the bottom of which the Genoese populace sent up to the windows--I

had to crane out very far to see it--a perpetual clattering, shuffling,

chaffering sound. Issuing forth, presently, into this crevice of a

street, I found an abundance of that soft local colour for the love of

which one revisits Italy. It offered itself, indeed, in a variety of

tints, some of which were not remarkable for their freshness or purity.

But their combined effect was highly pictorial, and the picture was a

very rich and various representation of southern low-life. Genoa is the

crookedest and most incoherent of cities; tossed about on the sides and

crests of a dozen hills, it is seamed with gullies and ravines that

bristle with those innumerable palaces for which we have heard from our

earliest years that the place is celebrated. These great edifices, with

their mottled and faded complexions, lift their big ornamental cornices

to a tremendous height in the air, where, in a certain indescribably

forlorn and desolate fashion, over-topping each other, they seem to

reflect the twinkle and glitter of the warm Mediterranean. Down about

the basements, in the little dim, close alleys, the people are for ever

moving to and fro, or standing in their cavernous doorways and their

dusky, crowded shops, calling, chattering, laughing, scrambling, living

their lives in the conversational Italian fashion. For a long time I had

not received such an impression of the human agglomeration. I had not

for a long time seen people elbowing each other so closely, or swarming

so thickly out of populous hives. A traveller is very often disposed to

ask himself whether it has been worth while to leave his home--whatever

his home may have been--only to see new forms of human suffering, only

to be reminded that toil and privation, hunger and sorrow and sordid

effort, are the portion of the great majority of his fellow-men. To

travel is, as it were, to go to the play, to attend a spectacle; and

there is something heartless in stepping forth into the streets of a

foreign town to feast upon novelty when the novelty consists simply of

the slightly different costume in which hunger and labour present

themselves. These reflections were forced upon me as I strolled about in

those crepuscular, stale-smelling alleys of Genoa; but after a time they

ceased to bear me company. The reason of this, I think, is because (at

least to foreign eyes) the sum of Italian misery is, on the whole, less

than the sum of the Italian knowledge of life. That people should thank

you, with a smile of striking sweetness, for the gift of twopence is a

proof, certainly, of an extreme and constant destitution; but (keeping

in mind the sweetness) it is also a proof of an enviable ability not to

be depressed by circumstances. I know that this may possibly be great

nonsense; that half the time that we are admiring the brightness of the

Italian smile the romantic natives may be, in reality, in a sullen

frenzy of impatience and pain. Our observation in any foreign land is

extremely superficial, and our remarks are happily not addressed to the

inhabitants themselves, who would be sure to exclaim upon the impudence

of the fancy-picture. The other day I visited a very picturesque old

city upon a mountain-top, where, in the course of my wanderings, I

arrived at an old disused gate in the ancient town-wall. The gate had

not been absolutely forfeited; but the recent completion of a modern

road down the mountain led most vehicles away to another egress. The

grass-grown pavement, which wound into the plain by a hundred graceful

twists and plunges, was now given up to ragged contadini and their

donkeys, and to such wayfarers as were not alarmed at the disrepair into

which it had fallen. I stood in the shadow of the tall old gateway

admiring the scene, looking to right and left at the wonderful walls of

the little town, perched on the edge of a shaggy precipice; at the

circling mountains over against them; at the road dipping downward among

the chestnuts and olives. There was no one within sight but a young man,

who was slowly trudging upward, with his coat slung over his shoulder

and his hat upon his ear, like a cavalier in an opera. Like an operatic

performer, too, he was singing as he came; the spectacle, generally, was

operatic, and as his vocal flourishes reached my ear I said to myself

that in Italy accident was always picturesque, and that such a figure

had been exactly what was wanted to set off the landscape. It suggested

in a high degree that knowledge of life for which I just now commended

the Italians. I was turning back, under the old gateway, into the town,

when the young man overtook me, and, suspending his song, asked me if I

could favour him with a match to light the hoarded remnant of a cigar.

This request led, as I walked back to the inn, to my having some

conversation with him. He was a native of the ancient city, and answered

freely all my inquiries as to its manners and customs and the state of

public opinion there. But the point of my anecdote is that he presently

proved to be a brooding young radical and communist, filled with hatred

of the present Italian government, raging with discontent and crude

political passion, professing a ridiculous hope that Italy would soon

have, as France had had, her "'89," and declaring that he, for his part,

would willingly lend a hand to chop off the heads of the king and the

royal family. He was an unhappy, underfed, unemployed young man, who

took a hard, grim view of everything, and was operatic only quite in

spite of himself. This made it very absurd of me to have looked at him

simply as a graceful ornament to the prospect, an harmonious little

figure in the middle distance. "Damn the prospect, damn the middle

distance!" would have been all his philosophy. Yet, but for the accident

of my having a little talk with him, I should have made him do service,

in memory, as an example of sensuous optimism!

I am bound to say, however, that I believe that a great deal of the

sensuous optimism that I noticed in the Genoese alleys and beneath the

low, crowded arcades along the port was very real. Here every one was

magnificently sunburnt, and there were plenty of those queer types,

mahogany-coloured, bare-chested mariners, with earrings and crimson

girdles, that make a southern seaport entertaining. 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. One of

the palaces is coloured a goodly red, and contains, in particular, the

grand people I just now spoke of. They live, indeed, in the third story;

but here they have suites of wonderful painted and gilded chambers, in

which there are many foreshortened frescoes in the vaulted ceilings, and

the walls are embossed with the most florid mouldings. These

distinguished tenants bear the name of Vandyke, though they are members

of the noble family of Brignole-Sale, one of whose children (the Duchess

of Galliera) has lately given proof of nobleness in presenting the

gallery of the Red Palace to the city of Genoa.