The history of Genoa, its proud and adventurous story, is almost wholly
a tale of the sea, full of mystery, cruelty, and beauty, a legend of sea
power, a romance of ships. It is a narrative in which sailors, half
merchants, half pirates, adventurers every one, put out from the city
and return laden with all sorts of spoil,--gold from Africa, slaves from
Tunis or Morocco, the booty of the Crusades; with here the vessel of the
Holy Grail bought at a great price, there the stolen dust of a great
Saint.
This spirit of adventure, which established the power of Genoa in the
East, which crushed Pisa and almost overcame Venice, was held in check
and controlled by the spirit of gain, the dream of the merchant, so that
Columbus, the very genius of adventure almost without an after-thought,
though a Genoese, was not encouraged, was indeed laughed at; and Genoa,
splendid in adventure but working only for gain, unable on this account
to establish any permanent colony, losing gradually all her possessions,
threw to the Spaniard the dominion of the New World, just because she
was not worthy of it. Men have called her Genoa the Proud, and indeed
who, looking on her from the sea or the sea-shore, will ever question
her title?--but the truth is, that she was not proud enough. She trusted
in riches; for her, glory was of no account if gold were not added to
it. If she entered the first Crusade as a Christian, it was really her
one disinterested action; and all the world acknowledged her valour and
her contrivance which won Jerusalem. But in the second Crusade, as in
the next, she no longer thought of glory or of the Tomb of Jesus, she
was intent on money; and since in that stony place but little booty
could be hoped for, she set herself to spoil the Christian, to provide
him at a price with ships, with provender, with the means of realising
his dream, a dream at which she could afford to laugh, secure as she was
in the possession of this world's goods. Then, when in the thirteenth
century those vast multitudes of soldiers, monks, dreamers, beggars,
and adventurers came to her, the port for Palestine, clamouring for
transports, she was sceptical and even scornful of them, but willing to
give them what they demanded, not for the love of God but for a price.
Even that beautiful and mysterious army of children which came to her
from France and Germany in 1212 seeking Jesus, she could hold in
contempt till, weary at last of feeding them, she found the galleys they
demanded, and in the loneliness of the sea betrayed them and sold them
for gold as slaves to the Arabs, so that of the seven thousand boys and
girls led by a lad of thirteen who came at the bidding of a voice to
Genoa, not one ever returned, nor do we hear anything further concerning
them but the rumour of their fate.
Thus Genoa appears to us of old and now, too, as a city of merchants.
She crushed Pisa lest Pisa should become richer than herself; she went
out against the Moors for Castile because of a whisper of the booty; she
sought to overthrow Venice because she competed with her trade in the
East; and to-day if she could she would fill up the harbour of Savona
with stones, as she did in the sixteenth century, because Savona takes
part of her trade from her. 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. Even to-day a Grimaldi spoils Europe at Monaco, as his ancestors
did of old.
One saint certainly of her own stock she may claim, St. Catherine
Adorni, born in 1447. But the Renaissance passed her by, giving her, it
is true, by the hands of an alien, the streets of splendid palaces we
know, but neither churches nor pictures; such paintings as she possesses
being the sixteenth century work of foreigners, Rubens, Vandyck,
Ribera, Sanchez Coello, and maybe Velasquez.
Yet barren though she is in art, at least Genoa has ever been fulfilled
with life. If her aim was riches she attained it, and produced much that
was worth having by the way. Without the appeal of Florence or Siena or
Venice or Rome, she is to-day, when they are passed away into dreams or
have become little more than museums, what she has ever been, a city of
business, the greatest port in the Mediterranean, a city full of various
life,--here a touch of the East, there a whisper of the West, a busy,
brutal, picturesque city, beauty growing up as it does in London,
suddenly for a moment out of the life of the place, not made or
contrived as in Paris or Florence, but naturally, a living thing, shy
and evanescent. 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. She has made to
herself friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, and they have remained
faithful to her. Her ports grow and multiply, her trade increases, still
she heaps up riches, and if she cannot tell who shall gather them, at
least she is true to herself and is not dependent on the stranger or the
tourist. The artist, it is said, is something of a daughter of joy, and
in thinking of Florence or Venice, which live on the pleasure of the
stranger, we may find the truth of a saying so obvious. Well, Genoa was
never an artist. She was a leader, a merchant, with fleets, with
argosies, with far-flung companies of adventure. Through her gates
passed the silks and porcelains of the East, the gold of Africa, the
slaves and fair women, the booty and loot of life, the trade of the
world. This is her secret. She is living among the dead, who may or may
not awaken.
If you are surprised in her streets by the greatness of old things, it
is only to find yourself face to face with the new. People, tourists do
not linger in her ways--they pass on to Pisa. Genoa has too little to
show them, and too much. She is not a museum, she is a city, a city of
life and death and the business of the world. You will never love her as
you will love Pisa or Siena or Rome or Florence, or almost any other
city of Italy. We do not love the living as we love the dead. 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. But through the music of
her life, so modern, so full of a sort of whining and despair in which
no great resolution or heroic notes ever come, there winds an old-world
melody, softly, softly, full of the sun, full of the sea, that is always
the same, mysterious, ambiguous, full of promises, at her feet.