Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa | Page 5

old as the
sun, he opened the year too, and the first month bears his name; and
while on earth he was the guardian deity of gates, in heaven he was
porter, and his sign was a ship; therefore he may well have taken to
himself the city of ships, the gateway of Italy, Genoa.
And through that gate what beautiful, terrible, and mysterious things
have passed into oblivion; Saints who have perhaps seen the very face
of Jesus; legions strong in the everlasting name of Caesar, that have
lost themselves in the fastnesses of the North; sailors mad with the song
of the sirens. On her quays burned the futile enthusiasm of the Middle
Age, that coveted the Holy City and was overwhelmed in the desert.
Through her streets surged Crusade after Crusade, companies of
adventure, lonely hermits drunken with silence, immense armies of
dreamers, the chivalry of Europe, a host of little children. On her
ramparts Columbus dreamed, and in her seas he fought with the
Tunisian galleys before he set sail westward for El Dorado. And here

Andrea Doria beat the Turks and blockaded his own city and set her
free; and S. Catherine Adorni, weary of the ways of the world, watched
the galleons come out of the west, and prayed to God, and saw the wind
over the sea. O beautiful and mysterious armies, O little children from
afar, and thou whose adventurous name married our world, what cities
have you taken, what new love have you found, what seas have your
ships furrowed; whither have you fled away when Genoa was so fair?
* * * * *
It was about the year 50 when St. Nazarus and St. Celsus, fleeing from
the terror of Nero, landed not far away to the east at Albaro, bringing
with them the new religion. A lane leading down to the sea still bears
the name of one of them, and, strangely as we may think, a ruined
church marks the spot crowning the rock above the place, where a
Temple of Venus once stood. Yet perhaps the earliest remnant of old
Genoa is to be found in the Church of S. Sisto in the Via di Prè,
standing as it does on the very stones of a church raised to the Pope and
martyr of that name in 260. In the journey which Pope Sixtus made to
Genoa he is said to have been accompanied by St. Laurence, and it is
probable that a church was built not much later to him also on the site
of the Duomo. However this may be, Genoa appears to have been
passionately Christian, for the first authority we hear of is that of the
Bishops, to whom she seems to have submitted herself enthusiastically,
installing them in the old castello in that the most ancient part of the
city around Piazza Sarzano and S. Maria di Castello. This castello,
destroyed in the quarrels of Guelph and Ghibelline, as some have
thought, may be found in the hall-mark of the silver vessels made here
under the Republic. Very few are the remnants that have come down to
us from the time of the Bishops. An inscription, however, on a house in
Via S. Luca close to S. Siro remains, telling how in the year 580 S. Siro
destroyed the serpent Basilisk. In the church itself a
seventeenth-century fresco commemorates this monstrous deed.
Of the Lombard dominion something more is left to us; the story at
least of the passing of the dust of St. Augustine. It seems that at the
beginning of the sixth century these sacred ashes had been brought

from Africa to Cagliari to save them from the Vandals. For more than
two hundred years they remained at Cagliari, when, the Saracens taking
the place, Luitprand, the Lombard king, remembering S. Ambrogio and
Milan, ransomed them for a great price and had them brought in 725 to
Genoa, where they were shown to the people for many days. Luitprand
himself came to Genoa to meet them and placed them in a silver urn,
discovered at Pavia in 1695, and carried them in state across the
Apennines. Some of the beautiful Lombard towers, such as S. Stefano
and S. Agostino, where the ashes are said to have been exposed, remind
us perhaps more nearly of the Lombard dominion. Then came
Charlemagne and his knights and the great quarrel. But though Genoa
now belonged to the Holy Roman Empire, she was not strong enough
to defend herself from the raids of the Saracens, who in the earlier part
of the tenth century burnt the city and led half the population into
captivity.
Perhaps it is to Otho that Genoa owes her first impulse towards
greatness: he gave her a sort of freedom at