For his autumn holiday in 1764 Smollett decided on a jaunt to Florence
and Rome, returning to Nice for the winter; and he decided to travel as
far as Leghorn by sea. There was choice between several kinds of small
craft which plied along the coast, and their names recur with cheerful
frequency in the pages of Marryat and other depictors of the
Mediterranean. There was the felucca, an open boat with a tilt over the
stern large enough to freight a post-chaise, and propelled by ten to
twelve stout mariners. To commission such a boat to Genoa, a distance
of a hundred miles, cost four louis. As alternative, there was the
tartane, a sailing vessel with a lateen sail. Addison sailed from
Marseilles to Genoa in a tartane in December 1699: a storm arose, and
the patron alarmed the passengers by confessing his sins (and such
sins!) loudly to a Capuchin friar who happened to be aboard. Smollett
finally decided on a gondola, with four rowers and a steersman, for
which he had to pay nine sequins (4 1/2 louis). After adventures off
Monaco, San Remo, Noli, and elsewhere, the party are glad to make the
famous phones on the Torre della Lanterna, of which banker Rogers sings
in his mediocre verse:
Thy pharos Genoa first displayed itself
Burning in stillness on its rocky seat;
That guiding star so oft the only one,
When those now glowing in the azure vault
Are dark and silent
Smollett's description of Genoa is decidedly more interesting. He
arrived at a moment specially propitious to so sardonic an observer,
for the Republic had fallen on evil times, having escaped from the
clutches of Austria in 1746 by means of a popular riot, during which
the aristocracy considerately looked the other way, only to fall into
an even more embarrassed and unheroic position vis-a-vis of so
diminutive an opponent as Corsica. The whole story is a curious
prototype of the nineteenth century imbroglio between Spain and Cuba.
Of commonplaces about the palaces fruitful of verbiage in Addison and
Gray, who says with perfect truth, "I should make you sick of marble
were I to tell you how it is lavished here," Smollett is sparing
enough, though he evidently regards the inherited inclination of
Genoese noblemen to build beyond their means as an amiable weakness.
His description of the proud old Genoese nobleman, who lives in marble
and feeds on scraps, is not unsympathetic, and suggests that the
"deceipt of the Ligurians," which Virgil censures in the line