IN LIGURIA
The most ravishingly beautiful entrance into Italy is by the road along
the Mediterranean shore. The French Riviera and its gilded pleasures,
its great hotels, its _chic_ resorts and its entrancing combination of
seascape and landscape are known to all classes of travellers, but at
Menton, almost on the frontier, one is within arm's reach of things
Italian, where life is less feverish, in strong contrast to the French
atmosphere which envelops everything to the west of the great white
triangle painted on the cliff above the Pont Saint Louis and marking the
boundary between the two great Latin countries.
The "Route Internationale," leading from France to Italy, crosses a deep
ravine by the Pont Saint Louis with the railway running close beside.
Not so very long ago there was a unity of speech and manners among the
inhabitants of Menton and the neighbouring Italian towns of Grimaldi,
Mortola and Ventimiglia, but little by little the Ravine of Saint Louis
has become a hostile frontier, where the custom house officials of
France and Italy regard each other, if not as enemies, at least as
aliens. The two peoples are, however, of the same race and have the same
historic traditions.
It was just here, on passing the frontier, that we asked a deep-eyed,
sun-burnt young girl of eighteen or twenty if she was an Italian,
thinking perhaps she might be a Niçoise, who, among the world's
beautiful women, occupy a very high place. She replied in
French-Italian: "Oui, aussi bien Venitienne!" This was strange, for most
Venetians, since Titian set the style for them, have been blondes.
A château of the Grimaldi family crowns the porphyry height just to the
eastward of the Italian frontier, and below is the Italian _Dogana_,
where the automobilist and other travellers by road go through the
formalities made necessary by governmental red tape. Red tape is all
right in the right place, but it should be cut off in proper lengths, so
that officials need not be obliged to quibble over a few soldi while
individuals lose a dozen francs or more in valuable time.
This matter of customs formalities at Grimaldi is only an incident. The
automobilist's troubles really commence at a little shack in Menton, on
French soil, just before the Pont Saint Louis is crossed. Here he has
his "passavant" made out, an official taking a lot of valuable time to
decide whether the cushions of your automobile are red, orange or brown.
You stick out for orange because they were that colour when you bought
the outfit, but the representative of the law sticks out too--he for
red. The result is, you compromise on brown, and hope that the other
customs guardian on duty at the frontier post by which you will enter
France again will be blessed with the same sense of colour-blindness as
was his fellow of Menton. Once this formality gone through--and you pay
only two sous for the documents--you have no trouble getting back into
France again by whichever frontier town you pass. There are no duties to
pay and no disputes, so really one cannot complain. It is for his
benefit anyway that the "passavant" describing the peculiarities of
automobile is issued.
At the Grimaldi _Dogana_ on entering Italy you are made to pay duty on
what little gasoline you may have in your tanks, even for as little as a
litre. Presumably you pass your machine through the Italian customs
with one of the "triptyches" issued by any of the great automobile clubs
or touring associations, as otherwise you have to put down gold, and a
thousand or fifteen hundred francs in gold one does not usually carry
around loose in his pocket. We passed through readily enough, but a poor
non-French, non-Italian speaking American who followed in our
wheel-tracks had not made his preparations beforehand, and French
banknotes didn't look good enough to the Italian customs official, and a
day was lost accordingly while the poor unfortunate rolled back down
hill to Menton and sought to turn the notes into gold. The banks having
just closed he was not able to do this as readily as he thought he
might, and it was well on after sunrise that he followed our trail--and
never caught up with us all the way to Grosetto.
Mortola is the first town of note that one passes on entering Italian
soil, but beyond its aspect, so alien to that of the small town in
France, it is not worthy of remark.
Ventimiglia comes next, where the traveller by rail goes through equally
annoying customs formalities to those experienced by the traveller by
road at Grimaldi. These are not apt to be so costly, as the customs
officials take him at his word, graciously chalk his luggage and pass
him on. The Guardie-Finanze, or customs officer, of Italy is a genteel
looking young person with a bowler hat, topped with a feather cockade.
He is even as gay and picturesque as the "carabinieri reales," though he
is a mere plebeian among the noblesse of soldierdom.
The Vintimille of the French, or the Ventimiglia of the Italians, was
the ancient Intemilium of the Romans. To-day, on the left bank of the
Roja, is a new city made up of the attributes of a great railway and
frontier station and a numerous assemblage of alberghi, hotels,
restaurants and the like.
Ventimiglia is not unlovely, neither is it lovely in a picturesque
romantic sense. Its site is charming, on the banks of the tumbling Roja
at the base of the Alps of Piedmont, just where they plunge, from a
height of a thousand or twelve hundred metres, down into the lapping
Mediterranean waves.
Ventimiglia is, practically, the frontier town of Piedmont, and it was
fought for by all the warring houses of these parts in the middle ages.
The Genoese held it for a time, then the Counts of Provence and the Duke
of Savoy. It was a game of give-and-take all round, and in the mêlée
most of the town's mediæval monuments have disappeared.
Across the Nervia, to the north, is Monte Appio, one of the chief spurs
of the Maritime Alps in Italy. On a jutting crag of rock, in plain view
from the town below, is an ancient Roman _castellum_. Two fragmentary
towers alone remain, and as a ruin, even, it is beneath consideration.
One only notices it in passing and recalls the more magnificent Tower of
Augustus at La Turbie, high above Monte Carlo's rock, and still in plain
view of Ventimiglia--with a good glass.
A fine relic of the Dorias--that great family of great Genoese--is still
to be seen in picturesque ruin at Dolce Acqua, a few miles further up
the valley of the torrent.
Bordighera is the first of the Italian Riviera winter stations for
invalids. That describes it perfectly. Its surroundings are delightful
enough, but there is little that is attractive about the place itself.
The automobilist will have no trouble finding his way through the town
if he keeps straight on but drives carefully and avoids the invalids and
baby carriages.
It was a sailor of Bordighera who gave the order to "wet the ropes"--an
old seafaring trick, known the world over--when the obelisk on the
Piazza san Pietro at Rome, erected by Sixte-Quint, was tottering on its
base. In return for the service he asked the favour of the Pope that his
native town should have the honour of supplying the churches of Rome
with their greenery on Palm Sunday. The supplying of palm branches and
the exploiting of semi-invalids are the chief industries of Bordighera.
San Remo is very like Bordighera, except that it is an improvement on
it. The quarter where the great hotels are found looks like all towns of
its class, but the old town with its narrow canyon-like streets, its
buttressed roofs and walls, still breathes of the mediæval spirit. It is
as crowded a quarter, where dwell men, women and children,--seemingly
children mostly,--as can be found east of Grand, Canal or Hester
Streets, in down-town New York. The automobile tourist will not care
much for San Remo unless he is hungry, in which case the Hotel de Paris
will cater for him a little better than any other of the town's resort
hotels.
The road continues close beside the sea, as it has since Fréjus in the
Var was passed, sweeping around bold promontories on a shelf of rock,
tunnelling through some mountain spur, dipping down to sea-level here
and rising three or five hundred metres ten kilometres further on.
This delightfully disposed road by the sea may well be reviled by the
automobilist because of the fact that every half dozen kilometres or so
it crosses the railway at the same level. These level crossings are
about as dangerous as the American variety; in a way more so. They are
barred simply by a great swinging tree-trunk, which, of all things,
swings outwards and across the road when not in use. Even when closed
this bar is so placed that an automobile at speed could well enough slip
beneath it, and the passengers who were not thrown out and killed by
this operation surely would be by the train which would probably come
along before they could pick themselves up.
These railway barriers are almost always closed, whether a train is due
or not, and it is commonly said that they are only opened for the
automobilist on the payment of a few soldi. This, the writer knows to be
calumny. It is conceivable that the circumstance has been met with, and
it is conceivable that, in many more instances, stranger automobilists
have scattered coin in their wake which led to the development of the
practice, but all the same one need not, should not, in fact,
countenance any such practice of blackmail. The mere fact that these
obstructions are there is enough of a penance for the automobilist, who
in ten hours of running will certainly lose one or two hours waiting for
the gates to be opened.
These Italian coast line vistas are quite the most savagely beautiful of
any along the Mediterranean. We rave over the strip dominated by La
Turbie and Monte Carlo's rock, and over the Corniche d'Or of the Estérel
in France, but really there is nothing quite so primitive and unspoiled
in its beauty as this less-known itinerary. The background mountains
rise, grim, behind, and beneath. At the bottom of the cliff, a hundred
metres below the road on which you ride, break the soapy waves of the
sea. Gulls circle about uttering their shrill cries, an eagle soars
above, and far below a fisherman pushes lazily at his oar in the
conventional stand-up Mediterranean fashion, or a red-brown
latteen-rigged fishing boat darts in or out of some half-hidden bay or
_calanque_. The whole poetic ensemble is hard to beat, and yet this part
of the average Italian journey is usually rolled off in express trains,
with never a stop between the frontier and Genoa, most of the time
passing through the fifty rock-cut tunnels which allow the railway
access to these parts. To see this wonderful strip of coast line at its
best it must be seen from the highroad.
At Arma, as the road runs along at the water's very edge, is an old
square donjon tower, reminding one of those great keeps of England and
of Foulque's Nerra in Normandy. Its history is lost in oblivion, but it
is a landmark to be noted.
Porto Maurizio is the very ideal of a small Mediterranean sea-port. It
is a hill-top town too, in that it crowns a promontory jutting seawards,
forming a sheltering harbour for its busy coming and going of small-fry
shipping.
Olive oil and a sweet white wine, like that of Cyprus, grown on the
hillsides roundabout, form the chief of the merchandise sent out from
the little port; but the whole town bears a prosperous well-kept air
that makes one regret that it had not a battery of "sights," in order
that one might linger a while in so pleasant a place. Porto Maurizio's
church is a remarkably vast and handsome building.
Oneglia, the birthplace of the great Genoese admiral, Andrea Doria, lies
just beyond. Wine in skins, hung up on rafters to mellow, seems to be
Oneglia's substitute for wine cellars, but otherwise the hurried
traveller at Oneglia remarks nothing but that it is a "resort" with big
hotels and big gardens and many guests lolling about killing time. The
older part of the town, with the wine skins, is decidedly the most
interesting feature.
At Marina-Andora is the ruin of an old castle with a ghostly legend to
it to add an attraction it might not otherwise have. A Papal Nuncio was
one day murdered here within its walls and "in extremis" the prelate
called down curses upon the surrounding country, praying that it might
wither and dry up. It must have been an efficacious imprecation as the
country roundabout looks like a desert waste. Not an olive nor an orange
grove is in sight and only a few scrubby vineyards dot the landscape.
At the Capo delle Melle, a dozen kilometres beyond, it all changes and
the land blossoms again, though truth to tell both the wine and olive
products have the reputation of falling off in quality as one goes
further east.
Alassio is a now well-developed Italian seaside resort. The Italians and
the Germans fill it to overflowing at all seasons of the year, and
prices are mounting skywards with a rapidity which would do credit to
Monte Carlo itself. There is a considerable fishing and coastwise trade
at Alassio which along the quais endows it with a certain
picturesqueness, and the chief hotel is quartered in a seventeenth
century palazzo, formerly belonging to the Marchese Durante. Alassio
took its name from Alassia, a daughter of Otho the Great, who, fleeing
from the paternal roof, came here with her lover long years ago. This
was the beginning of the development of Alassio as a Mediterranean
resort. And the Germans have been coming in increasing numbers ever
since.
Off shore is the isle of Gallinaria. It has a circular tower on it, and
a legend goes with it that the name of the island is derived from a
species of hens and chickens which were bred here. The connection seems
a little vague, but for the sake of variation, it is here given.
Here and there as the road winds along the coast some vine-clad ruin of
a castle tower is passed, and the background foot-hills of the Alps are
peopled with toy villages and towns like Switzerland itself.
Albenga is primarily a great big overgrown coast town of to-day, but was
formerly the ancient metropolis of a minor political division of
Liguria, and the one time ally of Carthage. Evidences of this fallen
pride of place are not wanting in Albenga to-day. There are innumerable
great brick and stone towers, now often built into some surrounding
structure. Three may be remarked as landmarks of the town's great civic
and military glory of the past: the Torre de Marchese Malespina, the
Torre dei Guelfi, and another, unnamed, built up into the present Casa
del Commune.
Albenga is not a resort, since it has the reputation of being an
unhealthful place, but probably this is not so as there is no particular
squalidness to be noticed, save that incident to the workaday affairs of
factories, workshops and shipping. The inhabitants of the neighbouring
towns profess to recognize the native of Albenga at a glance when they
hail him with the remark: "Hai faccia di Albenga."--"You have the
Albenga face." This is probably local jealousy only, and is not really
contempt.
A short way out from Albenga is the Ponte Lungo, an old Roman bridge of
the time of the Emperor Honorius. Savona, the largest place between the
frontier and Genoa, is still fifty kilometres to the eastward, but
midway between it and Albenga is Finale Marina, a town of one main
street, two enormous painted churches, an imposing fortification wall, a
palm-planted promenade and a municipal palace bearing, over its portal,
the arms of a visiting Spanish monarch who ruled here temporarily in the
fifteenth century.
The Castello Gavone, on a hillside above the town and back from the
coast, is a ruin, but its picturesque outer walls, with diamond-cut
stone facets, like those of the great round tower of Milan or of
Tantallon Castle in Scotland, are quite remarkable.
Finale Marina's Albergo Grimaldi is housed in an old château of some
noble of the days when the town was the capital of a Marquisate. Not
much changed is the old château, except to put new wine in the old
bottles and new linen on the antique beds. To be sure there are electric
push-buttons in the chambers, but as they are useless they can hardly be
taken into consideration.
The Albergo Grimaldi has scant accommodation for automobiles. Three
might range themselves along the wall in the lower corridor, and would
indeed be well enough housed, though in no sense is there the least
semblance of a garage. You pay nothing additional for this, and that's
something in Italy where automobiles--in the small towns--are still
regarded as mechanical curiosities and their occupants as fanatics with
more money than good sense. The Italian country population is by no
means hostile to the automobilist, but their good nature, even, is often
exasperating.
Finale Marina is the best stopping place between Menton and Genoa if one
is travelling by road, and would avoid the resorts.
Noli, just beyond the Capo di Noli, is an unimportant small town;
nevertheless it is the proud possessor of a collection of ruined walls
and towers which would be a pride to any mediæval "borgo." Noli, like
Albenga, was once the chief town of a little political division; but
to-day it is a complete nonentity.
In bright sunshine, from the road winding over the Capo di Noli, one may
see the smoke of Genoa's chimneys and shipping rising, cloud-like, on
the horizon far away to the eastward, and may even descry that classic
landmark, the great lighthouse called "La Lanterna" at the end of the
mole jutting out between San Pier d'Arena and Genoa.
A castle-crowned rocky islet, the Isola dei Bergeggi, lies close off
shore beneath the Capo di Vado, itself crowned with a seventeenth
century fortress cut out of the very rock.
Still following the rocky coastline, one draws slowly up on Savona.
Savona is backed up by olive gardens and pine-clad hills, while above,
away from the coast, roll the first foot-hills of the Apennines, their
nearby slopes and crests dotted, here and there, with some grim fortress
of to-day or a watch tower of mediæval times. The Alps are now dwindling
into the Apennines, but the change is hardly perceptible.
Above the roofs and chimneys of the town itself rises an old tower of
masonry on which is perched a colossal madonna, a venerated shrine of
the Ligurian sailor-folk. It bears an inscription which seems to scan
equally well in school-book Latin or colloquial Italian.
"In mare irato, in subita procella
Invoco te, nostra benigna stella."
Mago, the Carthaginian, made Savona a refuge after his sack of Genoa.
The Genoese, in turn, came along and blocked up the port out of sheer
jealousy, lest it might become a commercial rival of Genoa itself.
The bay of Savona is delightful, even Wordsworth, who mostly sang of
lakes and larks, remarked it, though in no way is it superior in beauty
to a score of other indentations in the Mediterranean coastline from
Marseilles around to Naples.
The automobilist will best remember Savona for its exceedingly bad
exits and entrances, and the clean and unencumbered streets in the town
itself. Here are great wide park-like thoroughfares flagged with flat
smooth stones which are a dream to the automobilist. There never were
such superbly laid paving blocks as one finds in Savona.
As one leaves Savona he actually begins to sense the smoke and
activities of Genoa in his nostrils, albeit they are a good fifty
kilometres away as yet; around a half a dozen jutting barrier capes, and
across innumerable railway tracks.
Varazze is not a stopping point on many travellers' Italian journeyings
and, to state it frankly, perhaps, for the majority, it is not worth
visiting. It is a sort of overflow Sunday resort for the people of
Genoa, in that each of its two hotels have dining accommodation for a
hundred people or more. Aside from this it is endowed with a certain
quaint picturesqueness. It has a palm-tree-lined quay which borders a
string of ship-building yards where the wooden walls of Genoa's
commerce-carrying craft were formerly built in large numbers, and where,
to-day, a remnant of this industry is still carried on. Great
long-horned white oxen haul timber through the crooked streets and
along the quays, and there is ever a smell of tar and the sound of
sawing and hammering. An artist with pen or brush will like Varazze
better than any other class of traveller. The automobilist will have all
he can manage in dodging the ox teams and their great trundling loads of
timber.
There is a fragment of a ruined castle near by on the outskirts of the
town, and farther away, back in the hills, is a monastery called "Il
Deserto," and properly enough named it is. It was founded by a lady of
the Pallavicini family who as a recompense--it is to be
presumed--insisted on being represented in the painted altar-piece as
the Madonna, though clad in mediæval Genoese dress. What vanity!
Cogoletto, practically a Genoese suburb, claims to be the birth place of
Columbus. Perhaps indeed it is so, as his father Dominico was known to
be a property owner near Genoa. Savona, Oneglia and Genoa itself all
have memories of the family, so the discoverer was of Ligurian parentage
without doubt.
"Sestri-Ponente! Cornigliano-Ligure! San Pier d'Arena!" (with its Villa
Serra and its Babylonian-like gardens) cry out the railway employees at
each stop of the Genoa-bound train; and the same names roll up on the
automobilist's road map with a like persistency. Each class of
traveller wonders why Genoa is not reached more quickly, and the
automobilist, for the last dozen kilometres, has been cursed with a most
exasperating, always-in-the-way tramway, with innumerable carts, badly
paved roads and much mud. The approaches to almost all great cities are
equally vile; Genoa is no exception and the traffic in the city--and in
all the built up suburbs--_keeps to the left_, a local custom which is
inexplicable since in the open country it goes to the right.
Voltri is a long drawn-out, uninteresting, waterside town with more
chimneys belching smoke and cinders in strong contrast to the pine-clad
background hills, in which nestle the suburban villas of the Doria, the
Galliera and the Brignole families of other days.
Pegli is but a continuation of Voltri, Genoa La Superba is still a dozen
kilometres away. Pegli is a resort of some importance and its chief
attraction is the Villa Pallavicini, with a labyrinth of grottoes,
subterranean lakes, cement moulded rocks, Chinese pagodas and the like.
It is not lovely, but is commonly reckoned a sight worth stopping off to
see. The Italians call this hodge podge "a ferocity of invention." The
phrase is worthy of perpetuation.
The Palazzo Pallavicini was the suburban residence of the banker of the
Court of Rome, but he was a sort of renegade financier, for he went off
to England with the churchly funds and became an English country
gentleman, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. His "past" was known, for
some poet-historian of the time branded him with the following
couplet:--
"Sir Horatio Palvasene,
Who robbed the Pope to pay the Queen."
The Villa Doria at Pegli was a work of Canzio built for one of the
richest merchants of Genoa in the days of Charles V. It was, like its
contemporaries, a gorgeous establishment, but in popular fancy it enjoys
not a whit of the enthusiasm bestowed upon the stagy, tricky bric-à-brac
and stucco Villa Pallavicini.
The entrance to "Genoa la Superba" by road from the west is a sorry
spectacle, a grim, crowded thoroughfare decidedly workaday and none too
cleanly. From San Pier d'Arena one comes immediately within the confines
of Genoa itself, just after circling the western port and passing the
sky-piercing "La Lanterna," one of the most ancient lighthouses extant,
dating from 1547.
[Illustration: _Palazzo Doria, Genoa_]
Genoa is neglected or ignored by most travellers and searchers after the
picturesque in Italy. This is a mistake, for Genoa's park of Acquasola,
the gardens of the Villa Rosazza and of the Villa de Negroni, and the
terraces of the Palazzo Doria offer as enchanting a series of panoramas
as those of Rome or Florence, and quite different, in that they have
always the vista of the blue Mediterranean as a background.
[Illustration: Map Genoa]
Genoa is a bizarre combination of the old and the new, of the mountain
and the plain, of great docks and wharves, and of streets of stairs
rising almost vertically.
The general effect of Genoa is as if everything in it had been piled one
on top of another until finally it had to spread out at the base.
Enormous caserns fringe the heights and great barracks line the wharves,
while in between, and here, there and everywhere, are great and
venerable palaces and churches of marble, many of them built in layers
of black and white stone, indicating that they were built by the commune
in mediæval days, or by one of the four great families of Doria,
Grimaldi, Spinola or Fieschi, the only ones who had the privilege of
using it.
Genoa's labyrinth of twisting, climbing streets and alleys are all but
impracticable for wheeled traffic, and, for that reason, strangers, who
do not walk "en tour" as much as they ought, save in the corridors of
picture galleries and the aisles of churches, know not Genoa save its
main arteries--nor ever will, unless they change their tactics.
The automobile is only useful in Genoa in getting in and out of town,
and even that is accomplished with fear and trembling by the most
cold-blooded chauffeur that ever lived. What with the vile roads, the
magnificent distances and the ceaseless irresponsible traffic of carts
and drays, tramways and what not, Genoa is indeed, of all other cities
on earth, in need of a boulevard for the new traffic. To get to your
hotel at the further end of the town as you make your entrance by the
road circling the base of "La Lanterna," can only be likened to a trip
down Broadway in New York at four o'clock in the afternoon. That would
not be pleasure; neither is getting in and out of Genoa at any time
between five in the morning and seven at night.
To what degenerate depths these great palaces of the Genoa of other days
have fallen only the curious and inquisitive are likely to know. One
into which we penetrated--looking for something which wasn't there--was
a veritable hive of industry, and as cosmopolitan as Babylon. It was
near the Bourse and one entered marble halls by a marble staircase,
flanked by a marble balustrade and finished off with newel posts
supported by marble lions. The great entrance hall was surrounded by a
colonnade of svelt marble columns, and in the centre ascended a
monumental marble staircase. Two marble fountains played in an inner
courtyard, which was paved with marble flags, and a statue, also marble,
in a niche faced the great doorway.
On the first floor were more marble columns and a frescoed vaulting.
From the corridors opened a battery of doors into offices of all sorts
of industrial enterprises, from one given to exploiting a new
combustible to another which was financing a rubber plantation in
Abyssinia. A chestnut-roaster was perambulating the corridors with his
stock in trade, furnace all alight, and a brown-robed monk was begging
his daily bread.
On the next floor, up another marble staircase, were still other
business offices,--shipping firms, wine-factors and one Guiseppe
Bellini, representing an American factory, whose output of agricultural
machinery is found in all four quarters of the globe. Breakfast foods
were there, too, and there was a big lithograph of a Fall River Line
Steamer on the walls. A whole city of merchants and agents were
cloistered here in the five stories of this one-time ducal abode.
Up under the roof was a photographer and an artist's studio, where a
long-haired Italian (Signor something or other, the sign read) painted
the bluest of blue sky pictures, and the most fiery Vesuvian eruptions,
to sell to tourists through the medium of the hotel porters of the town
below.
Thus it was that an antique shrine of gallantry and romance had become
the temple of twentieth century commerce. The noble arms, with a
heraldic angel still to be seen over the entrance doorway, count for
nothing to-day, but exist as a vivid reminder of a glorious past. In
1500 the palace was the shrine of an artistic nobility; to-day it is a
temple of chicanery.
The new part of Genoa imitates Milan, as Milan imitates Paris. The
galleries or arcades of Milan, Genoa and Naples, full of shops, cafés
and restaurants, would be admirable institutions in a more northerly
clime, where the sun is less strong and rain more frequent. Here their
glass roofs radiate an insufferable heat, which only in the coldest and
most intemperate months is at all bearable. Nevertheless these arcades
are an amusing and characteristic feature of the large Italian cities.
Hotels in Genoa for the automobilist are of all ranks and at all prices.
Bertolini's has garage accommodation for twenty-five automobiles, and
charges two francs and a half to four francs a night for the
accommodation, which is dear or not accordingly as you may feel.
The Albergo Unione, on the Palazzo Campetto, has no garage (you will
have to seek out the F. I. A. T. garage a mile or more away), but you
get something that is thoroughly Italian and very well appointed too,
at most reasonable prices.
The Genoese suburban villas are a part of Genoa itself, in that they
were built and inhabited by nobles of the city.
[Illustration: Sun Dial, Genoa]
To the east of Genoa, at Albaro, is a collection of villas which comes
upon one as a great surprise.
In reality they are suburban palaces, with here and there more modest
villas, and again mere modest dwellings. All are surrounded with hedges
of aloes, vines, olive and orange groves, and the effect is of the
country.
In the Villa del Paradiso Lord Byron was once a guest. Its loggia was a
favourite lounging place, and the whole aspect of the villa and its
grounds is as paradisal as one has any right to expect to find on earth.
The Villa Cambiaso was built in 1557 by Alessi from designs, it is
commonly said, of the great Michael Angelo. The ancient Sardinian
Palazzo Imperiali is also here, and is popularly known as the Albero
d'Oro.
A dozen miles to the east the gardens of the Villa de Franchi extend
down, stair by stair, and fountain by fountain, to the Mediterranean
rocks. The villa is a typical terrace-house, long, and almost dwarfish
on the front, where the "piano nobile" is also the ground floor; but on
the side facing the sea it is a story higher, and of stately
proportions, and is flanked by widely extending wings. It is the typical
Ligurian coast villa, one of a species which has set the copy for many
other seacoast villas and grounds.