Christopher Columbus and the New World of His Discovery | Page 9

foot-passengers, being of course too narrow for wheels;
and it is paved across with flagstones from door to door, so that the feet
and the voices echo pleasantly in it, and make a music of their own.
Without exception the ground floor of every house is a shop--the gayest,
busiest most industrious little shops in the world. There are shops for
provisions, where the delightful macaroni lies in its various bins, and
all kinds of frugal and nourishing foods are offered for sale. There are
shops for clothes and dyed finery; there are shops for boots, where
boots hang in festoons like onions outside the window--I have never
seen so many boot-shops at once in my life as I saw in the streets
surrounding the house of Columbus. And every shop that is not a
provision-shop or a clothes-shop or a boot-shop, is a wine-shop--or at
least you would think so, until you remember, after you have walked
through the street, what a lot of other kinds of shops you have seen on
your way. There are shops for newspapers and tobacco, for cheap
jewellery, for brushes, for chairs and tables and articles of wood; there
are shops with great stacks and piles of crockery; there are shops for
cheese and butter and milk--indeed from this one little street in Genoa
you could supply every necessary and every luxury of a humble life.
As you still go up, the street takes a slight bend; and immediately
before you, you see it spanned by the lofty crumbled arch of St.
Andrew's Gate, with its two mighty towers one on each side. Just as
you see it you are at Columbus's house. The number is thirty-seven; it
is like any of the other houses, tall and narrow; and there is a slab built
into the wall above the first storey, on which is written this
inscription:--
NVLLA DOMVS TITVLO DIGNIOR HEIC PATERNIS IN AEDIBV
CHRISTOPHORVS COLVMBVS PVERITIAM PRIMAMQVE
IVVENTAM TRANSEGIT

You stop and look at it; and presently you become conscious of a
difference between it and all the other houses. They are all alert, busy,
noisy, crowded with life in every storey, oozing vitality from every
window; but of all the narrow vertical strips that make up the houses of
the street, this strip numbered thirty-seven is empty, silent, and dead.
The shutters veil its windows; within it is dark, empty of furniture, and
inhabited only by a memory and a spirit. It is a strange place in which
to stand and to think of all that has happened since the man of our
thoughts looked forth from these windows, a common little boy. The
world is very much alive in the Vico Dritto di Ponticello; the little
freshet of life that flows there flows loud and incessant; and yet into
what oceans of death and silence has it not poured since it carried forth
Christopher on its stream! One thinks of the continent of that New
World that he discovered, and all the teeming millions of human lives
that have sprung up and died down, and sprung up again, and spread
and increased there; all the ploughs that have driven into its soil, the
harvests that have ripened, the waving acres and miles of grain that
have answered the call of Spring and Autumn since first the bow of his
boat grated on the shore of Guanahani. And yet of the two scenes this
narrow shuttered house in a bye-street of Genoa is at once the more
wonderful and more credible; for it contains the elements of the other.
Walls and floors and a roof, a place to eat and sleep in, a place to work
and found a family, and give tangible environment to a human
soul--there is all human enterprise and discovery, effort, adventure, and
life in that.
If Christopher wanted to go down to the sea he would have to pass
under the Gate of St. Andrew, with the old prison, now pulled down to
make room for the modern buildings, on his right, and go down the
Salita del Prione, which is a continuation of the Vico Dritto di
Ponticello. It slopes downwards from the Gate as the first street sloped
upwards to it; and it contains the same assortment of shops and of
houses, the same mixture of handicrafts and industries, as were seen in
the Vico Dritto di Ponticello. Presently he would come to the Piazza
dell' Erbe, where there is no grass, but only a pleasant circle of little
houses and shops, with already a smack of the sea in them, chiefly
suggested by the shops of instrument-makers, where to-day there are

compasses and sextants and chronometers. Out of the Piazza you come
down the Via di San Donato and into the Piazza of that