Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa | Page 4

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.
III
The gate of Italy, I said in speaking of her, and indeed it is one of the
derivations of her name Genoa,--Janua the gate, founded, as the
fourteenth-century inscription in the Duomo asserts, by Janus, a Trojan
prince skilled in astrology, who, while seeking a healthy and safe place
for his dwelling, sailed by chance into this bay, where was a little city
founded by Janus, King of Italy, a great-grandson of Noah, and finding
the place such as he wished, he gave it his name and his power. Now,
whether the great-grandson of Noah was truly the original founder of
the city, or Janus the Trojan, or another, it is certainly older than the
Christian religion, so that some have thought that Janus, that old god
who once presided at the beginning of all noble things, was the divine
originator of this city also. And remembering the sun that continually
makes Genoa to seem all of precious stone, of moonstone or alabaster,
it seems indeed likely enough, for Janus was worshipped of