As you stand under those strange arcades that run under the houses
facing the port, all that most ancient story of Genoa seems actual,
possible; it is as though in some extraordinarily vivid dream you had
gone back to less uniform days, when the beauty and the ugliness of the
world struggled for mastery, before the overwhelming victory of the
machine had enthroned ugliness and threatened the dominion of the soul
of man. In that shadowy place, where little shops like caverns open on
either side, with here a woman grinding coffee, there a shoe-maker at
his last, yonder a smith making copper pipkins, a sailor buying ropes,
an old woman cheapening apples, everything seems to have stood still
from century to century. There you will surely see the _mantilla_ worn
as in Spain, while the smell of ships, whose masts every now and then
you may see, a whole forest of them, in the harbour, the bells of the
mules, the splendour of the most ancient sun, remind you only of old
things, the long ways of the great sea, the roads and the deserts and
the mountains, the joy that cometh with the morning, so that there at
any rate Genoa is as she ever was, a city of noisy shadowy ways, cool
in the heat, full of life, movement, merchandise, and women.
And as it happens, this shadowy arcade, so close to the hotels (under
which, indeed, you must make your way to reach one of the oldest of
these hostelries, the Hôtel de la Ville), is a place to which the
traveller returns again and again, weary of the garish modernity that
has spoiled so much of the city, far at least from the tram lines that
have made of so many Italian cities a pandemonium. It is from this
characteristic pathway between the little shops that one should set out
to explore Genoa.
Passing along this passage eastward, you soon come to the Bank of St.
George, that black Dogana, built with Venetian stones from
Constantinople, a monument of hatred and perhaps of love,--hatred of the
Venetians, of the Pisans too, for here till our own time hung the iron
chains of Porto Pisano that Corrado Doria took in 1290; and of love,
since it was to preserve Genoa and her dominion that the Banca was
founded. Over the door you may still see remnants of the device the
Guelph Fieschi Pope, Innocent VII, gave to his native city when he came
to see her, the griffin of Genoa strangling the imperial eagle and the
fox of Pisa; while under is the motto, _Griphus ut has agit, sic hostes
Genua frangit_.
It was Guglielmo Boccanegra who built the place, as the inscription
reminds you,--it was his palace. But only the façade landward remains
from his time, with the lions' heads, the great hall and the façade
seaward dating from 1571, eleven years after Doria's death. In the tower
is the old bell which used to summon the Grand Council; it is of
seventeenth-century work, and was presented to the Bank by the Republic
of Holland.[2]
Within, the palace is a ruin, only the Hall of Grand Council being in
any way worth a visit. Here you may see statues of the chief benefactors
of the city from the middle of the fourteenth century to the middle of
the seventeenth. And by a curious device worthy of this city of
merchants, each citizen got a statue according to his gifts. Those who
save 100,000 lire were carved sitting there, while those who gave but
half this were carved standing; less rich and less liberal benefactors
got a bust or a mere commemorative stone, each according to his
liberality, and this (strangely we may think), in a city so religious
that it is dedicated to Madonna, might seem to leave nothing for the
widow with her mite who gave more than they all.
One comes out of that dirty and ruined place, that was once so splendid,
with a regret that modern Italy, which is so eager to build grandiose
banks and every sort of public building, is yet so regardless of old
things that one might fancy her history only began in 1860. Mr. Le
Mesurier, in the interesting book already referred to, has suggested
that this old palace, so full of memories of Genoa's greatness, should
be used by the municipality as a museum for Genoese antiquities. I
should like to raise my voice with his in this cause so worthy of the
city we have loved. Is it still true of her, that though she is proud
she is not proud enough? Is it to be said of her who sped Garibaldi on
his first adventure, that all her old glory is forgotten, that she is
content with mere wealth, a thing after all that she is compelled to
share with the latest American encampment, in which competition she
cannot hope to excel? But she who holds in her hands the dust of St.
John Baptist, who has seen the cup of the Holy Grail, whose sons stormed
Jerusalem and wept beside the Tomb of Jesus, through whose streets the
bitter ashes of Augustine have passed, and in whose heart Columbus was
conceived, and a great Admiral and a great Saint, is worthy of
remembrance. Let her gather the beautiful or curious remnants of her
great days about her now in the day of small things, that out of past
splendour new glory may rise, for she also has ancestors, and, like the
sun, which shall rise to-morrow, has known splendour of old.
As you leave the Banca di S. Giorgio, if you continue on your way you
will come on to the great ramparts, where you may see the sea, and so
you will leave Genoa behind you; but if, returning a little on your way,
you turn into the Piazza Banchi, you will be really in the heart of the
old city, in front of the sixteenth-century Exchange, Loggia dei Banchi,
where Luca Pinelli was crucified for opposing a Fregoso Doge who wished
to sell Livorno to Florence. Passing thence into the street of the
jewellers, Strada degli Orefici, where every sort of silver filigree
work may be found, with coral and amber, you come to Madonna of the
Street Corner, a Virgin and Child, with S. Lo, the patron of all sorts
of smiths, a seventeenth-century work of Piola. These narrow shadowy
ways full of men and women and joyful with children are the delight of
Genoa. There is but little to see, you may think,--little enough but
just life. For Genoa is not a museum: she lives, and the laughter of her
children is the greatest of all the joyful poems of Italy, maybe the
only one that is immortal.
With this thought in your heart (as it is sure to be everywhere in
Italy) you return (as one continually does) to the Arcades, and turning
to the left you follow them till you come to Via S. Lorenzo, in which is
the Duomo all of white and black marble, a jewel with mystery in its
heart, hidden away among the houses of life.
It was built on the site of a church which commemorated the passing of
S. Lorenzo through Genoa. Much of the present church is work of the
twelfth century, such as the side doors and the walls, but the façade
was built early in the fourteenth century, while the tower and the choir
were not finished till 1617. The dome was made by Galeazzo Alessi, the
Perugian who built so much in Genoa, as we shall see later. Possibly the
bas-reliefs strewn on the north wall are work of the Roman period, but
they are not of much interest save to an archeologist.
Within, the church is dark, and this I think is a disappointment, nor is
it very rich or lovely. Some work of Matteo Civitali is still to be seen
in a side chapel on the left, but the only remarkable thing in the
church itself is the chapel of St. John Baptist, into which no woman
may enter, because of the dancing of Salome, daughter of Herodias. There
in a marble urn the ashes of the Messenger have lain for eight
centuries, not without worship, for here have knelt Pope Alexander III,
our own Richard Cordelion, Federigo Barbarossa, Henry IV after Canossa,
Innocent IV, fugitive before Federigo II, Henry VII of Germany, St.
Catherine of Siena, and often too, St. Catherine Adorni, Louis XII of
France, Don John of Austria after Lepanto, and maybe, who knows,
Velasquez of Spain, Vandyck from England, and behind them, all the
misery of Genoa through the centuries, an immense and pitiful company of
men and women crying in the silence to him who had cried in the
wilderness.
Other curious, strange, and wonderful things, too, S. Lorenzo holds for
us in her treasury: a piece of the True Cross set in a cruciform casket
of gold crusted with precious stones, stolen, as most relics have been,
this one from the Venetians in the fourth Crusade, when the Emperor
Baldwin, whom Venice had crowned, sent it as gift to Pope Innocent III
by a Venetian galley, which, caught in a storm, took shelter in Modone
in Hellas, where two Genoese galleys found her and, having looted her,
sent the relic to S. Lorenzo in Genoa magnanimously, as Giustiniani
says. Here also beside this wonder you may see the cup of the Holy
Grail, stolen by the French, who, forced to return it, sent this broken
green glass in place of the perfect emerald they carried away; or maybe,
who knows, it was but glass in the beginning. Yet, indeed, the Genoese
paid a great price for it, thinking it truly the emerald of the Precious
Blood, but they may have deceived themselves in the joy that followed
the winning of the Holy City: though that is not like Genoa. However
this may be, and with relics you are as like to be right as wrong
whatever your opinion, there is but little else worth seeing in S.
Lorenzo.
As you follow the Via S. Lorenzo upwards, you come presently on your
left to the Piazza Umberto Primo, in which is the Palazzo Ducale, the
ancient palace of the Doges, rebuilt finally in 1777; and at last,
still ascending, you find yourself in the great shapeless Piazza
Deferrari, with its statue to Garibaldi, while at the top of the Via S.
Lorenzo on your right is the Church of S. Ambrogio, built by
Pallavicini, with three pictures, a Guido Reni, the Assumption of the
Virgin, and two Rubens, the Circumcision and S. Ignatius healing a
madman. Not far away (for you turn into Piazza Deferrari and take the
second street to the left, Strada S. Matteo) is the great Doria Church
of S. Matteo, in black and white marble, a sort of mausoleum of the
Doria family. Now, the family of Doria, one of the most ancient in
Genoa, the Spinola clan alone being older, emerges really about 1100,
and takes its rise, we are told, from Arduin, a knight of Narbonne, who,
resting in Genoa on his way to Jerusalem, married Oria, a daughter of
the Genoese house of della Volta. However this may be, in 1125 a certain
Martino Doria founded the Church of S. Matteo, which has since remained
the burial-place and monument of his race. Martino Doria is said to have
become a monk, and to have died in the monastery of S. Fruttuoso at
Portofino, where, too, lie many of the Doria family; but certainly as
early as 1298 S. Matteo became the monument of the Doria greatness, for
Lamba Doria, the victor of Curzola, where he beat the Venetian fleet,
was laid here, as you may see from the inscription on the old
sarcophagus at the foot of the façade of the church to the right. The
façade itself is covered with inscriptions in honour of various members
of the family: first, to Lamba, with an account of the battle. It reads
as follows: "To the glory of God and the Blessed Virgin Mary, in the
year 1298, on Sunday 7 September, this angel was taken in Venetian
waters in the city of Curzola, and in that place was the battle of 76
Genoese galleys with 86 Venetian galleys, of which 84 were taken by the
noble Lord Lamba Doria, then Captain and Admiral of the Commune and of
the People of Genoa, with the men on them, of which he brought back to
Genoa alive as prisoners 7400, along with 18 galleys, and the other 66
he caused to be burnt in the said Venetian waters,--he died at Savona
in 1323."[3] It was in this engagement that Marco Polo was taken
prisoner and brought to Genoa.
The second inscription on this façade refers to the battle of Sapienza,
when in 1354 Pagano Doria beat the Venetians off the coast of Greece. It
reads as follows:[4] "In honour of God and the Blessed Mary. In the
fourth day of November 1354, the noble Lord Pagano Doria with 31 Genoese
galleys, at the Island of Sapienza, fought and took 36 Venetian galleys
and four ships, and led to Genoa 1400 men alive as captives with their
captain."
The third inscription deals again with a defeat of the Venetian fleet,
by Luciano Doria in 1379. It reads as follows:[5] "To the glory of God
and the Blessed Mary. In the year 1379, on the 5th day of May, in the
Gulf of the Venetians near Pola, there was a battle of 22 Genoese
galleys with 22 galleys of the Venetians, in which were 4075 men-at-arms
and many other men from Pola; of which galleys 16 were taken with all
that was in them by the noble Lord Luciano Doria, Captain General of the
Commune of Genoa, who in the said battle while fighting valiantly met
his death. The sixteen galleys of the Venetians were conducted into
Genoa with 2407 captive men."
The fourth inscription refers to the earlier victory of Oberto Doria
over the Pisans. It is as follows:[6] "In the name of the Holy Trinity,
in the year of Our Lord 1284, on the 6th day of August, the high and
mighty Lord Oberto Doria, at that time Captain and Admiral of the
Commune and of the Genoese people, triumphed in the Pisan waters over
the Pisans, taking from them 33 galleys with 7 sunk and all the rest put
to flight, and with many dead men left in the waters; and he returned to
Genoa with a great multitude of captives, so that 7272 were placed in
the prisons. There was taken Andrea Morosini of Venice, then Podestà
and Captain General in war of the Commune of Pisa, with the standard of
the Commune, captured by the galleys of Doria and brought to this church
with the seal of the Commune, and there was also taken Loto, the son of
Count Ugolino, and a great part of the Pisan nobility."
The fifth inscription refers to the victory of Filippino Doria, nephew
to the great Admiral over the Spanish galleys in the Gulf of Salerno,
which led Andrea, to the consternation of Genoa, to attack the Pope's
galleys at Civitavecchia.
Within, the church was altered in 1530 by Montorsoli, the Florentine who
was brought from Florence by the Admiral. And there above the high altar
hangs his sword, given him by Pope Paul III, his friend and enemy.
There, too, in the left aisle is the Doria chapel, with a picture of
Andrea and his wife kneeling before our Lord. In the crypt, which was
decorated in stucco by Montorsoli, you may see his tomb.
Questo è quel Doria, che fa dai Pirati
Sicuro il vostro mar per tutti i lati.
The beautiful cloister contains the statues of Andrea and Giovandrea,
broken by the people in 1797. Close by is the Doria Palace, given by the
Republic to Andrea when he refused the office of Doge. It is decorated
with the privileged black and white marble, and bears the inscription,
_Senat. Cons. Andreae de Oria Patriae Liberatori Munus Publicium_.
If you return from S. Matteo to the Piazza Deferrari and then follow the
Via Carlo Felice (and without some sort of guidance such as this you are
like to be lost in the maze of the city) on your way to the beautiful
Piazza Fontane Marose, you pass on your left the Palazzo Pallavicini,
empty now of all its treasures.
On your right as you enter this square of palaces is the Palazzo della
Casa, once the Palazzo Spinola, decorated with the black and white
marble, built in the early part of the fifteenth century, in the place
where the old tower of that great family once stood. It is the palace of
the oldest Genoese family, and the statues in the façade represent the
most famous members of the clan, as Oberto, the son of the founder of
this branch of the race, the Luccoli Spinola, Conrado, who ruled the
city in 1206, and Opizino, who married his daughter to Theodore
Paleologus, Emperor of Constantinople, and lived like a king and was
banished in 1309. The palace itself is said to have been built with the
remains of the Fieschi palace which the Senate destroyed in 1336. Beyond
it rise the Palazzo Negrone and the Palazzo Pallavicini, while opposite
the Negrone Palace the Via Nuova, now called Via Garibaldi (for the
Italians have a bad habit of renaming their old streets), opens, a vista
of palaces, where all the greatness and splendour of Genoa rise up
before you in houses of marble, and courtyards musical with fountains,
walls splendid with frescoes, and rooms full of pictures.
Before passing into this street of palaces, however, the traveller
should follow the difficult Salita di S. Caterina, which climbs between
Palazzo della Casa and Palazzo Negrone towards the Acqua Sola, that
lovely garden, passing on his way the old Palazzo Spinola, where many an
old and precious canvas still hangs on the walls, and the spoiled
frescoes of the beautiful portico are fading in the sun.
It is perhaps in the Via Garibaldi, Via Cairoli, and Via Balbi, avenues
of palaces narrow because of the summer sun, bordered on either side by
triumphant slums, that the real Genoa splendid and living may best be
surprised. Here, amid all the grave and yet homely magnificence of the
princes of the State, life, with a brilliance and a misery all its own,
ebbs and flows, and is not to be denied. Between two palaces of marble,
silent, and full maybe of the masterpieces of dead painters, you may
catch sight of the city of the people, a "truogolo" perhaps with a great
fountain in the midst, where the girls and women are washing clothes,
and the children, whole companies of them, play about the doorways,
while above, the houses, and indeed the court itself, are bright with
coloured cloths and linen drying in the wind and the sun. It is a city
like London that you discover, living fiercely and with all its might,
but without the brutality of our more terrible life, where as here
wealth rises up in the midst of poverty, only here wealth is noble and
without the blatancy and self-satisfaction you find in our squares, and
poverty has not lost all its joyfulness, its air of simplicity and
romance, as it has with us.
It is these palaces, so noble and, as one might think, so deserted, that
Galeazzo Alessi built in the sixteenth century for the nobles of Genoa.
And it is his work, whole streets of it, that has named the city the
City of Palaces, as we say, and has given her something of that proud
look which clings to her in her title, La Superba. Yet not altogether
from the magnificence of her old streets has this name come to her, but
in part from the character of her people, and in great measure, too,
from her brave position there between the mountains and the sea, a city
of precious stone in an amphitheatre of noble hills. Nothing that Genoa
could build, steal, or win could even be so splendid as that birthright
of hers, her place among the mountains on the shores of the great sea.
As one enters Via Garibaldi from Piazza Marose down the vistaed street
where a precious strip of the blue sky seems more lovely for the shadowy
way, the first house on the right is Palazzo Cambiaso, built by Alessi,
while on the left, No. 2, is Palazzo Gambaro, which belonged to the
Cambiaso family. No. 3 on the right is Palazzo Parodi, another of
Alessi's works, built in 1567 for Franco Lercaro; No. 4 is Palazzo
Carega; No. 5, Palazzo Spinola, again by Alessi; while Palazzo Giorgio
Doria, No. 6, was also built by him. Here, beside frescoes by the
Genoese Luca Cambiaso, you may find a Vandyck, a portrait of a lady and
a Sussanah by Veronese. In the Palazzo Adorno too, No. 10, the work of
Alessi, you may find several fine pictures, among them three trionfi in
the manner of Botticelli, and a Rubens; while in Palazzo Serra, No. 12,
but you may not enter, there is a fine hall. The Palazzo Municipale,
built by Rocco Lurago at the end of the sixteenth century, has five
frescoes of the life of the Doge Grimaldi, and Paganini's violin, a
Guarnerius, on which Señor Sarasate played not long ago.
It is, however, in Palazzo Rosso, No. 18, possibly a work of Alessi's,
that you may see what these Genoese palaces really are, for the Marchesa
Maria Brignole-Sale, to whom it belonged, presented it to the city in
1874. It is into a vestibule, desolate enough certainly, that you pass
out of the life of the street, and, ascending the great bare staircase,
come at last on the third storey into the picture gallery. There is
after all, but little to see; for, splendid though some of the pictures
may once have been, they are now for the most part ruined. There
remains, however, a Moretto, the portrait of a Physician, and the
portrait of the Marchese Antonio Giulio Brignole-Sale on horseback, the
beautiful work of Vandyck. Looking at this picture and its fellow, the
portrait of the Marchesa, it is with sorrow we remember the fate that
has befallen so many of Vandyck's masterpieces painted in this city. For
either they have been carried away, like the magnificent group of the
Lommellini family to Edinburgh, the Marchesa Brignole with her child to
England, or they have been repainted and spoiled.
It was in 1621, on the 3rd October, that Vandyck, mounted on "the best
horse in Rubens' stables," set out from Antwerp for Italy. After staying
a short while in Brussels, he journeyed without further delay across
France to Genoa. With him came Rubens' friend, Cavaliere Giambattista
Nani. He reached Genoa on 20th November, where his friends of the de
Wael family greeted him.
The city of Genoa, herself without a school of painting, had welcomed
Rubens not long before very gladly, nor had Vandyck any cause to
complain of her ingratitude. He appears to have set himself to paint in
the style of Rubens, choosing similar subjects, at any rate, and thus to
have won for himself, with such work as the Young Bacchantes, now in
Lord Belper's collection, or the Drunken Silenus, now in Brussels, a
reputation but little inferior to his master's. Certainly at this time
his work is very Flemish in character, and apparently it was not till
he had been to Venice, Mantua, and Rome that the influence of Italy and
the Italian masters may be really found in his work. A disciple of
Titian almost from his youth, it is the work of that master which
gradually emancipates him from Flemish barbarism, from a too serious
occupation with detail, the over-emphasis of northern work, the mere
boisterousness, without any real distinction, that too often spoils
Rubens for us, and yet is so easily excused and forgotten in the mere
joy of life everywhere to be found in it. Well, with this shy and
refined mind Italy is able to accomplish her mission; she humanises him,
gives him the Latin sensibility and clarity of mind, the Latin
refinement too, so that we are ready to forget he was Rubens'
country-man, and think of him often enough as an Englishman, endowed as
he was with much of the delicate and lovely genius of so many of our
artists, full of a passionate yet shy strength, that some may think is
the result of continual communion with Latin things, with Italy and
Italian work, Italian verse, Italian painting, on the part of a race not
Latin, but without the immobility, the want of versatility, common to
the Germans, which has robbed them of any great painter since the early
Renaissance, and in politics has left them to be the last people of
Europe to win emancipation.
Much of this enlightening effect that Italy has upon the northerner may
be found in the work of Vandyck on his return to Genoa, really a new
thing in the world, as new as the poetry of Spenser had been, at any
rate, and with much of his gravity and sweet melancholy or pensiveness,
in those magnificent portraits of the Genoese nobility which time and
fools have so sadly misused. And as though to confirm us in this thought
of him, we may see, as it were, the story of his development during this
journey to the south in the sketch-book in the possession of the Duke of
Devonshire. Here, amid any number of sketches, thoughts as it were that
Titian has suggested, or Giorgione evoked, we see the very dawn of all
that we have come to consider as especially his own. We may understand
how the pride and boisterous magnificence of Rubens came to seem a
little insistent a little stupid too, beside Leonardo's Virgin and Child
with St. Anne now in the Louvre, which he notes in Milan, or that Last
Supper which is now but a shadow on the wall of S. Maria delle Grazie.
And above all, we may see how the true splendour of Titian exposes the
ostentation of Rubens, as the sun will make even the greatest fire look
dingy and boastful. Gradually Vandyck, shy and of a quiet, serene
spirit, becomes aware of this, and, led by the immeasurable glory of the
Venetians, slowly escapes from that "Flemish manner" to be master of
himself; so that, after he has painted in the manner of Titian at
Palermo, he returns to Genoa to begin that wonderful series of
masterpieces we all know, in which he has immortalised the tragedy of a
king, the sorrowful beauty, frail and lovely as a violet, of Henrietta
Maria, and the fate of the Princes of England. And though many of the
pictures he painted in Genoa are dispersed, and many spoiled, some few
remain to tell us of his passing. One, a Christ and the Pharisees, is in
the Palazzo Bianco, not far from Palazzo Rosso, on the opposite side of
the Via Garibaldi. But here there is a fine Rubens too; a Gerard David,
very like the altar-piece at Rouen; a good Ruysdael, with some
characteristic Spanish pictures by Zurbaran, Ribera, and Murillo; and
while the Italian pictures are negligible, though some paintings and
drawings of the Genoese school may interest us in passing, it is
characteristic of Genoa that our interest in this collection should be
with the foreign work there.
As you leave Via Garibaldi and pass down Via Cairoli, on your left you
pass Via S. Siro. Turning down this little way, you come almost
immediately to the Church of S. Siro. The present building dates from
the seventeenth century, but the old church, then called Dei Dodici
Apostoli, was the Cathedral of Genoa. It was close by that the blessed
Sirus "drew out the dreadful serpent named Basilisk in the year 550."
What this serpent may really have been no one knows, but Carlone has
painted the scene in fresco in S. Siro.
Returning to Via Cairoli, at the bottom, in Piazza Zecca on your left,
is one of the Balbi palaces; while in Piazza Annunziata, a little
farther on, you come to the beautiful Church of Santissima Annunziata
del Vastato, built by Della Porta in 1587.
Crossing this Piazza, you enter perhaps the most splendid street in
Genoa, Via Balbi, which climbs up at last to the Piazza Acquaverde, the
Statue of Columbus, and the Railway. The first palace on your right is
Palazzo Durazzo-Pallavicini, with a fine picture gallery. Here you may
see two fine Rubens, a portrait of Philip IV of Spain, and a Silenus
with Bacchantes, a great picture of James I of England with his family,
painted by some "imitator" of Vandyck, though who it was in Genoa that
knew both Vandyck and England is not yet clear; a Ribera, a Reni, a
Tintoretto, a Domenichino, and above all else Vandyck's Boy in White
Satin, in the midst of these ruined pictures which certainly once would
have given us joy. The Boy in White Satin is perhaps the loveliest
picture Vandyck left behind him; though it is but partly his after all,
the fruit, the parrot, and the monkey being the work of Snyders.
On the other side of the Via Balbi, almost opposite the Palazzo
Durazzo-Pallavicini, is the Palazzo Balbi, which possesses the loveliest
cortile in Genoa, with an orange garden, and in the Great Hall a fine
gallery of pictures. Here is the Vandyck portrait of Philip II of Spain,
which Velasquez not only used as a model, or at least remembered when he
painted his equestrian Olivarez in the Prado, but which he changed, for
originally it was a portrait of Francesco Maria Balbi, till, as is said,
Velasquez came and painted there the face of Philip II. Certainly
Velasquez may have sketched the picture and used it later, but it seems
unlikely that he would have painted the face of Philip II, whom he had
never seen, though the Genoese at that time might well have asked him to
do so.[7]
As you continue on your way up Via Balbi, you have on your right the
Palazzo dell' Università, with its magnificent staircase built in 1623
by Bartolommeo Bianco. Some statues by Giovanni da Bologna make it worth
a visit, while of old the tomb of Simone Boccanegra, the great Doge,
made such a visit pious and necessary.
Opposite the University is the Palazzo Reale, which once belonged to the
Durazzo family. A crucifixion by Vandyck is perhaps not too spoiled to
be still called his work.
So at last you will come to the Piazza Acquaverde and the Statue of
Columbus, which is altogether dwarfed by the Railway Station. Not far
away to the left, behind this last, you will find the great Palazzo
Doria. It is almost nothing now, but in John Evelyn's day, when
accompanied by that "most courteous marchand called Tornson," he went to
see "the rarities," it was still full of its old splendour. "One of the
greatest palaces here for circuit," he writes, "is that of the Prince
d'Orias, which reaches from the sea to the summit of the mountaines. The
house is most magnificently built without, nor less gloriously furnished
within, having whole tables and bedsteads of massy silver, many of them
sett with achates, onyxes, cornelians, lazulis, pearls, turquizes, and
other precious stones. The pictures and statues are innumerable. To this
palace belong three gardens, the first whereof is beautified with a
terrace supported by pillars of marble; there is a fountaine of eagles,
and one of Neptune, with other sea-gods, all of the purest white marble:
they stand in a most ample basine of the same stone. At the side of this
garden is such an aviary as S^r. Fra. Bacon describes in his _Sermones
Fidelium_ or Essays, wherein grow trees of more than two foote diameter,
besides cypresse, myrtils, lentiscs, and other rare shrubs, which serve
to nestle and pearch all sorts of birds, who have an ayre and place
enough under their ayrie canopy, supported with huge iron worke
stupendious for its fabrick and the charge. The other two gardens are
full of orange trees, citrons, and pomegranates; fountaines, grotts, and
statues; one of the latter is a colossal Jupiter, under which is a
sepulchre of a beloved dog, for the care of which one of this family
receiv'd of the K. of Spayne 500 crownes a yeare during the life of the
faithful animal. The reservoir of water here is a most admirable piece
of art; and so is the grotto over against it."
Close by Palazzo Doria is the Church of S. Giovanni di Prè, with its
English tomb and Lombard tower, and memories of the two Urban popes
Urban V and Urban VI, the first of whom stayed here on his way back to
Rome from the Babylonian captivity, while the other murdered eight of
his Cardinals close by, and threw their bodies into the sea. This is the
quarter of booty, the booty of the Crusaders, and it is in such a place
and in the older part of the town near Piazza Sarzano and in the narrow
ways behind the Exchange that, as I think, Genoa seems most herself, the
port of the Mediterranean, the gate of Italy. Yet what I prefer in Genoa
are her triumphant slums, then the palaces and villas with their
bigness, so impressive for us who came from the North, which seem to be
a remnant of Roman greatness, a vision as it were of solidity and
grandeur. Something of this, it is true, haunts almost every Italian
city; only nowhere but in Genoa can you see so many palaces together,
whole streets of them, huge, overwhelming, and yet beautiful houses,
that often seem deserted, as though they belonged to a greater and more
splendid age than ours.
It is altogether another aspect of these splendid buildings that you see
from the ramparts towards Nervi, from the height of the Via Corsica or
from the hills. From there, with the whole strength and glory of the sea
before you, these palaces, which in the midst of the city are so
indestructible and immortal, seem flowerlike, full of delicate hues,
fragile and almost as though about to fade; you think of hyacinths, of
the blossom of the magnolia, of the fleeting lilac, and the lily that
towers in the moonlight to fall at dawn. Returning to the city in the
twilight with all this passing and fragile glory in your eyes, it is
again another emotion that you receive when, on entering the city, you
find yourself caught in the immense crowd of working people flocking
homewards or to Piazza Deferrari, to the cafés, through the narrow
streets, amid swarms of children, laughing, running, gesticulating or
fighting with one another. From the roofs where they seem to live, from
the high narrow windows, the warren of houses that would be hovels in
the North, but here in the sun are picturesque, women look down lazily
and cry out, with a shrillness peculiar to Genoa, to their friends in
the street. It is a bath of multitude that you are compelled to take,
full of a sort of pungent, invigorating, tonic strength, life crowding
upon you and thrusting itself under your notice without ceremony or
announcement. If on the 2nd November you chance to be in Genoa, you will
find the same insatiable multitude eagerly flocking to the cemetery,
that strange and impossible museum of modern sculpture, where the dead
are multiplied by an endless apparition of crude marble shapes, the
visions of the vulgar hacked out in dazzling, stainless white stone.
What would we not give for such a "document" from the thirteenth century
as this cemetery has come to be of our own time. It is the crude
representation of modern Italian life that you see, realistic, unique,
and precious, but for the most part base and horrible beyond words. All
the disastrous, sensual, covetous meanness, the mere baseness of the
modern world, is expressed there with a naïveté that is, by some
miraculous transfiguration, humorous with all the grim humour of that
thief death, who has gathered these poor souls with the rest because
someone loved them and they were of no account. The husk of the
immortality of the poet and the hero has been thrust upon the mean and
disgusting clay of the stockbroker; the grocer, horribly wrapped in
everlasting marble, has put on ignominy for evermore; while the
plebeian, bewildered by the tyranny of life, crouches over his dead
wife, for ever afraid lest death tap him too on the shoulder. How the
wind whistles among these immortal jests, where the pure stone of the
Carrara hills has been fashioned to the ugliness of the middle classes.
This is the supreme monument not of Genoa only, but of our time. In that
grotesque marble we see our likeness. For there is gathered in
indestructible stone all the fear, ostentation, and vulgar pride of our
brothers. Ah, poor souls! that for a little minute have come into the
world, and are eager not altogether to be forgotten; they too, like the
ancients, have desired immortality, and, seeing the hills, have sought
to establish their mediocrity among them. Therefore, with an obscene and
vulgar gesture, they have set up their own image as well as they could,
and, in a frenzied prayer to an unknown God, seem to ask, now that
everything has fallen away and we can no longer believe in the body,
that they may not be too disgusted with their own clay. Thus in frenzy,
fear, and vanity they have carved the likeness of that which was once
among the gods.