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Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa

by Edward Hutton · English · Gutenberg #16477 · 906,762 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa

Author: Edward Hutton


        
Release date: August 8, 2005 [eBook #16477]
                Most recently updated: December 12, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FLORENCE AND NORTHERN TUSCANY WITH GENOA ***




Produced by Ted Garvin, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net









FLORENCE

AND NORTHERN TUSCANY

WITH GENOA


BY EDWARD HUTTON

       *       *       *       *       *

    O rosa delle rose, O rosa bella,
    Per te non dormo nè notte nè giorno,
    E sempre penso alla tua faccia bella,
    Alle grazie che hai, faccio ritorno.
    Faccio ritorno alle grazie che hai:
    Ch'io ti lasci, amor mio, non creder mai.

WITH SIXTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR BY WILLIAM PARKINSON AND SIXTEEN
OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS

SECOND EDITION

LONDON, 1907, 1908

       *       *       *       *       *

TO MY FRIEND WILLIAM HEYWOOD

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

    FREDERIC UVEDALE: A ROMANCE
    STUDIES IN THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS
    ITALY AND THE ITALIANS
    THE CITIES OF UMBRIA
    THE CITIES OF SPAIN
    SIGISMONDO MALATESTA
    COUNTRY WALKS ROUND FLORENCE. (_In the Press_).
    ROME. (_In preparation_)

       *       *       *       *       *

[Illustration: FROM THE UFFIZI]

       *       *       *       *       *




CONTENTS


  I.      GENOA
  II.     ON THE WAY
  III.    PORTO VENERE
  IV.     SARZANA AND LUNA
  V.      CARRARA, MASSA DUCALE, PIETRA-SANTA, VIAREGGIO
  VI.     PISA
  VII.    LIVORNO
  VIII.   TO SAN MINIATO AL TEDESCO
  IX.     EMPOLI, MONTELUPO, LASTRA, SIGNA
  X.      FLORENCE
  XI.     PIAZZA DELLA SIGNORIA AND PALAZZO VECCHIO
  XII.    THE BAPTISTERY--THE DUOMO--THE CAMPANILE--THE OPERA DEL DUOMO
  XIII.   OR SAN MICHELE
  XIV.    PALAZZO RICCARDI, AND THE RISE OF THE MEDICI
  XV.     SAN MARCO AND SAVONAROLA
  XVI.    SANTA MARIA NOVELLA
  XVII.   SANTA CROCE
  XVIII.  SAN LORENZO
  XIX.    CHURCHES NORTH OF ARNO
  XX.     OLTR'ARNO
  XXI.    THE BARGELLO
  XXII.   THE ACCADEMIA
  XXIII.  THE UFFIZI
  XXIV.   THE PITTI GALLERY
  XXV.    FIESOLE AND SETTIGNANO
  XXVI.   VALLOMBROSA AND THE CASENTINO
  XXVII.  PRATO
  XXVIII. PISTOJA
  XXIX.   LUCCA
  XXX.    OVER THE GARFAGNANA




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


IN COLOUR

  VIEW FROM THE UFFIZI
  ON THE ROAD
  BADIA A SETTIMO
  PONTE VECCHIO
  LOGGIA DE' LANZI
  PIAZZA DEL DUOMO
  OR SAN MICHELE
  THE FLOWER MARKET, FLORENCE
  CHIOSTRO DI S. MARCO
  S. MARIA NOVELLA
  OGNISSANTI
  VIA GUICCIARDINI
  PONTE VECCHIO
  THE BOBOLI GARDENS
  COSTA DI S. GIORGIO
  OUTSIDE THE GATE


IN MONOTONE

  PORTO VENERE
  PISA
  WAX MODEL FOR THE PERSEUS IN THE BARGELLO, BENVENUTO CELLINI
  THE MADONNA DELLA CINTOLA, BY NANNI DI BANCO, DUOMO, FLORENCE
  SINGING BOYS FROM THE CANTORIA OF LUCA DELLA ROBBIA, OPERA DEL DUOMO,
      FLORENCE
  THE CRUCIFIXION, BY FRA ANGELICO, S. MARCO, FLORENCE
  ST. JOHN THE DIVINE, BY DONATELLO, DUOMO, FLORENCE
  THE LADY WITH THE NOSEGAY (VANNA TORNABUONI), IN THE BARGELLO, BY ANDREA
      VERROCCHIO
  "LA NOTTE," FROM TOMB OF GIULIANO DE' MEDICI, BY MICHELANGELO
  THE ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS, BY DOMENICO GHIRLANDAJO, ACCADEMIA
  THE THREE GRACES, FROM THE PRIMAVERA, BY SANDRO BOTTICELLI, ACCADEMIA
  THE BIRTH OF VENUS, BY SANDRO BOTTICELLI, UFFIZI GALLERY
  THE ANNUNCIATION, BY ANDREA VERROCCHIO, UFFIZI GALLERY
  PIETÀ, BY FRA BARTOLOMMEO, PITTI GALLERY
  THE TOMB OF ILARIA DEL CARETTO, BY JACOPO DELLA QUERCIA, DUOMO, LUCCA
  THE TOMB OF THE MARTYR S. ROMANO IN S. ROMANO, LUCCA, BY MATTEO CIVITALI

[Illustration: A MAP OF THE CITIES OF NORTHERN TUSCANY]

       *       *       *       *       *




I. GENOA

I


The traveller who on his way to Italy passes along the Riviera di
Ponente, through Marseilles, Nice, and Mentone to Ventimiglia, or
crossing the Alps touches Italian soil, though scarcely Italy indeed, at
Turin, on coming to Genoa finds himself really at last in the South, the
true South, of which Genoa la Superba is the gate, her narrow streets,
the various life of her port, her picturesque colour and dirt, her
immense palaces of precious marbles, her oranges and pomegranates and
lemons, her armsful of children, and above all the sun, which lends an
eternal gladness to all these characteristic or delightful things,
telling him at once that the North is far behind, that even Cisalpine
Gaul is crossed and done with, and that here at last by the waves of
that old and great sea is the true Italy, that beloved and ancient land
to which we owe almost everything that is precious and valuable in our
lives, and in which still, if we be young, we may find all our dreams.
What to us are the weary miles of Eastern France if we come by road, the
dreadful tunnels full of despair and filth if we come by rail, now that
we have at last returned to her, or best of all, perhaps, found her for
the first time in the spring at twenty-one or so, like a fair woman
forlorn upon the mountains, the Ariadne of our race who placed in our
hand the golden thread that led us out of the cavern of the savage to
the sunlight and to her. But though, indeed, I think all this may be
clearer to those who come to her in their first youth by the long white
roads with a song on their lips and a dream in their hearts--for the
song is drowned by the iron wheels that doubtless have their own music,
and the dream is apt to escape in the horror of the night imprisoned
with your fellows; still, as we are so quick to assure ourselves, there
are other ways of coming to Italy than on foot: in a motor-car, for
instance, our own modern way, ah! so much better than the train, and
truly almost as good as walking. For there is the start in the early
morning, the sweet fresh air of the fields and the hills, the long halt
at midday at the old inn, or best of all by the roadside, the afternoon
full of serenity, that gradually passes into excitement and eager
expectancy as you approach some unknown town; and every night you sleep
in a new place, and every morning the joy of the wanderer is yours. You
never "find yourself" in any city, having won to it through many
adventures, nor ever are you too far away from the place you lay at on
the night before. And so, as you pass on and on and on, till the road
which at first had entranced you, wearies you, terrifies you,
relentlessly opening before you in a monstrous white vista, and you who
began by thinking little of distance find, as I have done, that only the
roads are endless, even for you too the endless way must stop when it
comes to the sea; and there you have won at last to Italy, at Genoa.

If you come by Ventimiglia, starting early, all the afternoon that white
vision will rise before you like some heavenly city, very pure and full
of light, beckoning you even from a long way off across innumerable and
lovely bays, splendid upon the sea. While if you come from Turin, it is
only at sunset you will see her, suddenly in a cleft of the mountains,
the sun just gilding the Pharos before night comes over the sea,
opening like some great flower full of coolness and fragrance.

It was by sea that John Evelyn came to Genoa after many adventures; and
though we must be content to forego much of the surprise and romance of
an advent such as that, yet for us too there remain many wonderful
things which we may share with him. The waking at dawn, for instance,
for the first time in the South, with the noise in our ears of the bells
of the mules carrying merchandise to and from the ships in the _Porto_;
the sudden delight that we had not felt or realised, weary as we were on
the night before, at finding ourselves really at last in the way of such
things, the shouting of the muleteers, the songs of the sailors getting
their ships in gear for the seas, the blaze of sunlight, the pleasant
heat, the sense of everlasting summer. These things, and so much more
than these, abide for ever; the splendour of that ancient sea, the
gesture of the everlasting mountains, the calmness, joy, and serenity of
the soft sky.

Something like this is what I always feel on coming to that proud city
of palaces, a sort of assurance, a spirit of delight. And in spite of
all Tennyson may have thought to say, for me it is not the North but the
South that is bright "and true and tender." For in the North the sky is
seldom seen and is full of clouds, while here it stretches up to God.
And then, the South has been true to all her ancient faiths and works,
to the Catholic religion, for instance, and to agriculture, the old
labour of the corn and the wine and the oil, while we are gone after
Luther and what he leads to, and, forsaking the fields, have taken to
minding machines.

And so, in some dim way I cannot explain, to come to Italy is like
coming home, as though after a long journey one were to come suddenly
upon one's mistress at a corner of the lane in a shady place.

It is perhaps with some such joy in the heart as this that the fortunate
traveller will come to Genoa the Proud, by the sea, lying on the bosom
of the mountains, whiter than the foam of her waves, the beautiful gate
of Italy.

II

The history of Genoa, its proud and adventurous story, is almost wholly
a tale of the sea, full of mystery, cruelty, and beauty, a legend of sea
power, a romance of ships. It is a narrative in which sailors, half
merchants, half pirates, adventurers every one, put out from the city
and return laden with all sorts of spoil,--gold from Africa, slaves from
Tunis or Morocco, the booty of the Crusades; with here the vessel of the
Holy Grail bought at a great price, there the stolen dust of a great
Saint.

This spirit of adventure, which established the power of Genoa in the
East, which crushed Pisa and almost overcame Venice, was held in check
and controlled by the spirit of gain, the dream of the merchant, so that
Columbus, the very genius of adventure almost without an after-thought,
though a Genoese, was not encouraged, was indeed laughed at; and Genoa,
splendid in adventure but working only for gain, unable on this account
to establish any permanent colony, losing gradually all her possessions,
threw to the Spaniard the dominion of the New World, just because she
was not worthy of it. Men have called her Genoa the Proud, and indeed
who, looking on her from the sea or the sea-shore, will ever question
her title?--but the truth is, that she was not proud enough. She trusted
in riches; for her, glory was of no account if gold were not added to
it. If she entered the first Crusade as a Christian, it was really her
one disinterested action; and all the world acknowledged her valour and
her contrivance which won Jerusalem. But in the second Crusade, as in
the next, she no longer thought of glory or of the Tomb of Jesus, she
was intent on money; and since in that stony place but little booty
could be hoped for, she set herself to spoil the Christian, to provide
him at a price with ships, with provender, with the means of realising
his dream, a dream at which she could afford to laugh, secure as she was
in the possession of this world's goods. Then, when in the thirteenth
century those vast multitudes of soldiers, monks, dreamers, beggars,
and adventurers came to her, the port for Palestine, clamouring for
transports, she was sceptical and even scornful of them, but willing to
give them what they demanded, not for the love of God but for a price.
Even that beautiful and mysterious army of children which came to her
from France and Germany in 1212 seeking Jesus, she could hold in
contempt till, weary at last of feeding them, she found the galleys they
demanded, and in the loneliness of the sea betrayed them and sold them
for gold as slaves to the Arabs, so that of the seven thousand boys and
girls led by a lad of thirteen who came at the bidding of a voice to
Genoa, not one ever returned, nor do we hear anything further concerning
them but the rumour of their fate.

Thus Genoa appears to us of old and now, too, as a city of merchants.
She crushed Pisa lest Pisa should become richer than herself; she went
out against the Moors for Castile because of a whisper of the booty; she
sought to overthrow Venice because she competed with her trade in the
East; and to-day if she could she would fill up the harbour of Savona
with stones, as she did in the sixteenth century, because Savona takes
part of her trade from her. What Philip of Spain did for God's sake,
what Visconti did for power, what Cesare Borgia did for glory, Genoa has
done for gold. She is a merchant adventurer. Her true work was the Bank
of St. George. One of the most glorious and splendid cities of Italy,
she is, almost alone in that home of humanism, without a school of art
or a poet or even a philosopher. Her heroes are the great admirals, and
adventurers--Spinola, Doria, Grimaldi, Fieschi, men whose names linger
in many a ruined castle along the coast who of old met piracy with
piracy. Even to-day a Grimaldi spoils Europe at Monaco, as his ancestors
did of old.

One saint certainly of her own stock she may claim, St. Catherine
Adorni, born in 1447. But the Renaissance passed her by, giving her, it
is true, by the hands of an alien, the streets of splendid palaces we
know, but neither churches nor pictures; such paintings as she possesses
being the sixteenth century work of foreigners, Rubens, Vandyck,
Ribera, Sanchez Coello, and maybe Velasquez.

Yet barren though she is 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
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 any rate. And immediately
after his day the Genoese began to make way against the Saracens on the
seas. You may see a relic of some passing victory in the carved Turk's
head on a house at the corner of Via di Prè and Vico dei Macellai. Nor
was this all, for about this time Genoa seized Corsica, that fatal
island which not only never gave her peace, but bred the immortal
soldier who was finally to crush her and to end her life as a free
power.

There follow the Crusades. These splendid follies have much to do with
the wealth and greatness of Genoa. It was from her port that Godfrey de
Bouillon set sail in the _Pomella_ as a pilgrim in 1095. He appears to
have been insulted at the very gate of Jerusalem, or, as some say, at
the door of the Holy Sepulchre. At any rate he returned to Europe, where
Urban II, urged by Peter the Hermit, was already half inclined to
proclaim the First Crusade. Godfrey's story seems to have decided him;
and, indeed, so moving was his tale, that the crowd who heard him cried
out urging the Pope to act, _Dieu le veult_, the famous and fatal cry
that was to lead uncounted thousands to death, and almost to widow
Europe. In Genoa the war was preached furiously and with success by the
Bishops of Gratz and Arles in S. Siro. An army of enthusiasts, monks,
beggars, soldiers, adventurers, and thieves, moved partly by the love of
Christ, partly by love of gain, gathered in Genoa. With them was
Godfrey. They sailed in 1097: they besieged Antioch and took it. Content
it might seem with this success, or fearful in that stony place of
venturing too far from the sea, the Genoese returned, not empty. For on
the way back, storm-bound perhaps in Myra, they sacked a Greek
monastery there, carrying off for their city the dust of St. John
Baptist, which to-day is still in their keeping.

Was it the hope of loot that caused Genoa in 1099 to send even a larger
company to Judaea under the great Guglielmo Embriaco, whose tower to-day
is all that is left of what must once have been a city of towers? Who
knows? He landed with his Genoese at Joppa, burnt his ships as Caesar
did, though doubtless he thought not of it, and marching on Jerusalem
found the Christians still unsuccessful and the Tomb of Christ, as now,
ringed by pagan spears. But the Genoese were not to be denied. If the
valour of Europe was of no avail, the contrivance of the sea, the
cunning of Genoa must bring down Saladin. So they set to work and made a
tower of scaffolding with ropes, with timbers, with spars saved from
their ships. When this was ready, slowly, not without difficulty, surely
not without joy, they hauled and heaved and drove it over the burning
dust, the immense wilderness of stones and refuse that surrounded
Jerusalem. Then they swarmed up with songs, with shouting, and leapt on
to the walls, and over the ramparts into the Holy City, covered with
blood, filled with the fury of battle, wounded, dying, mad with hatred,
to the Tomb of Jesus, the empty sepulchre of God.

Then eight days after came that strange election, when we offered the
throne of Palestine to Godfrey of Bouillon; but he refused to wear a
crown of gold where his Saviour had worn one of thorns, so we proclaimed
him Defender of the Holy Sepulchre.

But the Genoese under Embriaco as before returned home, again not
without spoil. And their captain for his portion claimed the _Catino_,
the famous vessel, fashioned as was thought of a single emerald, truly,
as was believed, the vessel of the Holy Grail, the cup of the Last
Supper, the basin of the Precious Blood. To-day, if you are fortunate,
as you look at it in the Treasury of S. Lorenzo, they tell you it is
only green glass, and was broken by the French who carried it to Paris.
But, indeed, what crime would be too great in order to possess oneself
of such a thing? It was an emerald once, and into it the Prince of Life
had dipped His fingers; Nicodemus had held it in his trembling hands to
catch the very life of God; who knows what saint or angry angel in the
heathen days of Napoleon, foreseeing the future, snatched it away into
heaven, giving us in exchange what we deserved. Surely it was an emerald
once? Is it possible that a Genoese gave up all his spoil for a green
glass, a cracked pipkin, a heathen wash pot, empty, valueless, a
fraud?--I'll not believe it.

Embriaco, however, returned once more to Palestine with his men,
fighting under Godfrey at Cesarea; and again he came home in triumph,
his galleys low with spoil. And indeed, though we hear no more of
Embriaco, by the end of the first Crusade, Genoa had won possessions in
the East,--streets in Jaffa, streets in Jerusalem, whole quarters in
Antioch, Cesarea, Tyre, and Acre, not to speak of an inscription in the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre, "Prepotens Genuensium Presidium," which
Godfrey had carved there, while the Pope gave them their cross of St.
George as arms, which, as some say, we got from them.

Strangely as we may think, in the second Crusade, and even in the third,
so disastrous for the Christian arms, Genoa bore no part; no part, that
is, in the fighting, though in the matter of commissariat and shipping
she was not slow to come forward and make a fortune. And indeed, she had
enough to do at home; for Pisa, no less slow to join the Crusades,
became her enemy, jealous of her growing power and of her possession of
Corsica, so that in 1120 war broke out between them, which scarcely
ceased till Pisa was finally beaten on the sea, and the chains of Porto
Pisano were hanging on the Palazzo di S. Giorgio.

Soon, however, Genoa was engaged in a more profitable business, an
affair after her own heart, in which valour was not its own reward,--I
mean, in the expedition in 1147 against the Moors in Spain. Certainly
the Pope, Eugenius III it was, urged them to it, but so they had been
urged to fight against Saladin without arousing enthusiasm. Yet in this
new cause all Genoa was at fever heat. Wherefore? Well, Granada was a
great and wealthy city, whereas Jerusalem was a ruined village. So they
sent thirty thousand men with sixty galleys and one hundred and sixty
transports to Almeria, which after some hard fighting, for your Moor was
never a coward, they took, with a huge booty. In the next year they took
Tortosa, and returned home laden with spoil, silver lamps for the shrine
of St. John Baptist, for instance, and women and slaves.

Still, Genoa had no peace, for we find her making a stout and successful
defence shortly after against Frederic I, the whole city, men, women,
and children, on his approach from Lombardy, building a great wall about
the city in fifty-three days, of which feat Porta S. Andrea remains the
monument. Then followed that pestilence of Guelph and Ghibelline; out of
which rose the names of the great families, robbers, oppressors,
tyrants,--Avvocato, Spinola, Doria, the Ghibellines, with the Guelphs,
Castelli, Fieschi, Grimaldi. Nor was Genoa free of them till the great
Admiral Andrea Doria crushed them for ever. Yet peace of a sort there
was, now and again, in 1189 for instance, when Saladin won back
Jerusalem, and the Guelph nobles volunteered in a body to serve against
him, leaving Genoa to the Ghibellines, who established the foreign
Podestà for the first time to rule the city. But this gave them no
peace, for still the nobles fought together, and if one family became
too powerful, confusion became worse confounded, for Guelph and
Ghibelline joined together to bring it low. Thus in the thirteenth
century you find Ghibelline Doria linked with the Guelph Grimaldi and
Fieschi to break Ghibelline Spinola. The aspect of the city at that time
was certainly very different from the city of to-day, which is mainly of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries where it is not quite modern.
Then each family had its tower, from which it fought or out of which it
issued, making the streets a shambles as it followed the enemy home or
sought him out. The ordinary citizen must have had an anxious time of
it with these bands of idle cut-throats at large. But by the close of
the twelfth century the towers, at any rate, had been destroyed by order
of the Consuls, the only one left being that which we see to-day, Torre
degli Embriachi, left as a monument to a cunning valour. The thirteenth
century saw the domination of the Spinola family, or rather of one
branch of it, the Luccoli Spinola, which as opposed to the old S. Luca
branch seems to have lived nearer the country and the woods, and was
apparently most disastrous for the internal peace of the city; and
indeed, until the Luccoli were beaten and exiled, as happened in the
beginning of the fourteenth century, there could be no peace; truly the
only peace Genoa knew in those days was that of a foreign war, when the
great lords went out against Pisa or Venice.

The Venetian war, unlike that against Pisa, ended disastrously. Its
origin was a question of trade in the East, where the Comneni had given
certain rights to Genoa which on their fall the Venetians refused to
respect. The quarrel came to a head in that cause of so many quarrels,
the island of Crete, for the Marquis of Monferrat had sold it to the
Venetians while he offered it to the Genoese, he himself having received
it as spoil in the fourth Crusade. In this quarrel with Venice, Genoa
certainly at first had the best of it. In 1261, or thereabout, she
founded two colonies at Pera and Caffa, on the Bosphorus and in the
Euxine, thus adding to her empire, which was rather a matter of business
than of dominion. This is illustrated very effectually by the history of
the Bank of St. George, which from this time till its dissolution at the
end of the eighteenth century was, as it were, the heart of Genoa. It
was Guglielmo Boccanegra, the grandfather of a more famous son, who
built the palace which, as we now see it on the quay, is so sad and
ruinous a monument to the independent greatness of the city. And since
its stones were, as it is said, brought from Constantinople, where
Michael Paleologus had given the Genoese the Venetian fortress of
Pancratone, it is really a monument of the hatred of Genoa for Venice
that we see there, the principal door being adorned with three lions'
heads, part of the spoil of that Venetian fortress. This palace, on the
death of Boccanegra, Captain of the People, was used by the city as an
office for the registration of the _compere_ or public loans, which
dated from 1147 and the Moorish expedition. From the time of the
foundation of the Bank the shares were, like our consols, to be bought
and sold and were guaranteed by the city herself, though it was not till
1407 that the loans were consolidated and the Palazzo delle Compere, as
it was called, became the Banco di S. Giorgio. Indeed, though its real
power may be doubted, it administered, in name at any rate, the colonies
of Genoa after the fall of Constantinople.

Of the building itself I speak elsewhere; it is rather to its place in
the story of Genoa that I have wished here to draw attention.

And it was now, indeed, that Genoa reached, perhaps, the zenith of her
power. For in 1284 comes the great victory of Meloria, which laid Pisa
low. Enraged partly at the success of Genoa in the East, partly at her
growing power and general wealth, Pisa, with that extraordinary flaming
and ruthless energy so characteristic of her, determined to dispose of
Genoa once and for all. Nor were the Genoese unwilling to meet her.
Indeed, they urged her to it. The two fleets, bearing some sixty
thousand men, that of Pisa commanded by a Venetian, Andrea Morosini,
that of Genoa by Oberto Doria, met at Meloria, not far from Bocca
d'Arno, when the Pisans were utterly defeated, partly owing to the
treachery of the immortal Count Ugolino, who sailed away without
striking a blow.[1] Yet in spite of her defeat Pisa carried on the war
for four years, when she sued for peace, which, however, she could not
keep, so that in 1290 we find Corrado Doria sailing into the Porto
Pisano, breaking the chain which guarded it, and carrying it back to
Genoa, where part of it hung as a trophy till our own time on the façade
of the Palazzo di S. Giorgio.

Nor were the Genoese content, for soon after this victory we find them,
led by Lamba Doria, utterly beating the Venetians at Curzola, in the
Adriatic, where they took a famous prisoner, Messer Marco Polo, just
returned from Asia. They brought him back to Genoa, where he remained in
prison for nearly two years, and wrote his masterpiece. Whether it was
the influence of so illustrious a captive, or merely the natural
expression of their own splendid and adventurous spirit, about this time
the Doria fitted out two galleys to explore the western seas, and to try
to reach India by way of the sunset. Tedisio Doria and the brothers
Vivaldi with some Franciscans set out on this adventure, and never
returned.

With the fourteenth century Genoa for a time threw off the yoke of her
great nobles, Spinola, Doria, Grimaldi, Fieschi. The wave of revolt that
passed over Europe at this time certainly left Genoa freer than she had
ever been. The people had claimed to name their own "Abbate," in
opposition to the Captain of the People. They chose by acclamation
Simone Boccanegra, who, however, seeing that he was to have no power,
refused the office. "If he will not be Abbate," cried a voice in the
crowd, "let him be Doge"; and seeing the enthusiasm of the people, this
great man allowed himself to be borne to S. Siro, where he was crowned
first Doge of Genoa for life. The nobles seem to have been afraid to
interfere, so great was the eagerness of the people. And it was about
this time that the Grimaldi, driven out of Genoa, seized Monaco, which
by the sufferance of Europe they hold to-day. It is true, that for a
time in 1344 the nobles gathered an army and returned to Genoa,
Boccanegra resigning and exiling himself in Pisa; but twelve years later
he was back again, ruling with temperance and wisdom that great city,
which was now queen of the Mediterranean sea.

To follow the fortunes of the Republic one would need to write a book.
It must be sufficient to say here that by the middle of the century war
broke out with Venice, and was at first disastrous for Genoa. Then once
more a Doria, Pagano it was, led her to victory at Sapienza, off the
coast of Greece, where thirty-one Genoese galleys fought thirty-six of
Venice and took them captive. But the nobles were never quiet, always
they plotted the death of the Doge Giovanni da Morta, or Boccanegra. It
was with the latter they were successful in 1363, when they poisoned him
at a banquet in honour of the King of Cyprus--for they had possessed
themselves of a city in that island. Thus the nobles came back into
Genoa, Adorni, Fregosi, Guarchi, Montaldi, this time; lesser men, but
not less disastrous for the liberty of Genoa than the older families. So
they fought among themselves for mastery, till the Adorni, fearing to be
beaten, sold the city to Charles VI of France, who made them his
representative and gave them the government. And all this time the war
with Venice continued. At first it promised success,--at Pola, for
instance, where Luciano Doria was victorious, but at last beaten at
Chioggia, and not knowing where to turn to make terms, the supremacy of
the seas passed from Genoa to Venice, peace coming at last in 1381.

Then the Genoese turned their attention to the affairs of their city. In
the first year of the fifteenth century they rose to throw off the
French yoke. But France was not so easily disposed of. She sent Marshal
Boucicault to rule in Genoa; and he built the Castelletto, which was
destroyed only a few years ago in our father's time. In 1409, however,
Boucicault thought to gain Milan, for Gian Galeazzo Visconti was dead.
In his absence the Genoese rose and threw out the French, preferring
their own tyrants. These, Adorni, Montaldi, Fregosi, fought together
till Tommaso Fregosi, fearing that the others might prove too strong for
him, sold the city to Filippo Maria Visconti, tyrant of Milan. So the
Visconti came to rule in Genoa.

This period, full of the confusion of the petty wars of Italy, while
Sforza was plotting for his dukedom and Malatesta was building his Rocca
in Rimini; while the Pope was a fugitive, and the kingdom of Naples in a
state of anarchy, is famous, so far as Genoa is concerned, for her
victory at sea over King Alfonso of Aragon, pretender against René of
Anjou to the throne of Naples. The Visconti sided with the House of
Anjou, and Genoa, in their power for the moment, fought with them; so
that Biagio Assereto, in command of the Genoese fleet, not only defeated
the Aragonese, but took Alfonso prisoner, together with the King of
Navarre and many nobles. That victory, strangely enough, made an end of
the rule of the Visconti in Genoa. For, seeing his policy led that way,
Filippo Maria Visconti ordered the Genoese to send their illustrious
prisoners to Milan, where he made much of them, fearing now rather the
French than the Spaniards, since the Genoese had disposed of the latter
and so made the French all-powerful. This spoliation, however, enraged
the Genoese, who joined the league of Florence and Venice, deserting
Milan. At the word of Francesco Spinola they rose, in 1436, killed the
Milanese governor outside the Church of S. Siro, and once more declared
a Republic. To little purpose, as it proved, for the feuds betwixt the
great families continued, so that by 1458 we find Pietro Fregosi,
fearing the growing power of the Adorni, and hard pressed by King
Alfonso, who never forgave an injury, handing over Genoa to Charles VIII
of France.

Meantime, in 1453, Constantinople had fallen before Mahomet, and the
colony of Galata was thus lost to Genoa. And though in this sorry
business the Genoese seem to be less blameworthy than the rest of
Christendom--for they with but four galleys defeated the whole Turkish
fleet--Genoa suffered in the loss of Galata more than the rest, a fact
certainly not lost upon Venice and Naples, who refused to move against
the Turk, though the honour of Europe was pledged in that cause. But all
Italy was in a state of confusion. Sforza, that fox who had possessed
himself of the March of Ancona, and had never fought in any cause but
his own, on the death of Visconti had with almost incredible guile
seized Milan. He it was who helped the Genoese to throw out the French,
only to take Genoa for himself. A man of splendid force and confidence,
he ruled wisely, and alone of her rulers up to this time seems to have
been regretted when, in 1466, he died, and was succeeded in the Duchy
of Milan by his son Galeazzo. This man was a tyrant, and ruled like a
barbarian, till his assassination in 1476. There followed a brief space
of liberty in Genoa, liberty endangered every moment by the quarrels of
the nobles, who at last proposed to divide the city among them, and
would have thus destroyed their fatherland, had not Il Moro, Ludovico
Sforza of Milan, intervened and possessed himself of Genoa, which he
held till 1499, when Louis XII of France defeated him, Genoa placing
herself under his protection.

Meanwhile Columbus, that mystical dreamer who might have restored to
Genoa all and more than all she had lost in colonial dominion, was born
and grew up in those narrow streets, and played on the lofty ramparts
and learned the ways of ships. Genoa in her proud confusion heard him
not, so he passed to Salamanca and the Dominicans, and set sail from
Cadiz. Yet he never forgot Genoa, and indeed it is characteristic of
those great men who are without honour in their own country, that they
are ever mindful of her who has rejected them. The beautiful letter
written to the Bank of St. George in 1498 from Seville, as he was about
to set out on what proved to be his last voyage, is witness to this.

"Although my body," he writes, "is here, my heart is always with you.
God has been more bountiful to me than to any one since David's time.
The success of my enterprise is already clear, and would be still more
clear if the Government did not cover it with a veil. I sail again for
the Indies in the name of the Most Holy Trinity, and I return at once;
but as I know I am but mortal, I charge my son Don Diego to pay you
yearly and for ever the tenth part of all my revenue, in order to
lighten the toll on wine and corn. If this tenth part is large you are
welcome to it; if small, believe in my good wish. May the Most Holy
Trinity guard your noble persons and increase the lustre of your
distinguished office."

Such were the last words of Columbus to his native city. You may see his
birthplace, the very house in which he was born, on your left in the
Borgo dei Lanajoli, as you go down from the Porta S. Andrea.

It was in 1499 that Louis of France got possession of Genoa. He held the
city, cowed as it was, till 1507, when, goaded into rebellion by
insufferable wrongs, the people rose and threw out his Frenchmen with
their own nobles, choosing as their Doge Paolo da Novi, a dyer of silk,
one of themselves. Not for long, however, was Paolo to rule in Genoa,
for Louis retook the city, and Paolo, who had fled to Pisa, was captured
as he sailed for Rome, and put to death.

It was now that it came into the mind of Louis, who had learned nothing
from experience, to build another fort like to the Castelletto, to wit
the Briglia, to bridle the city. This he did, yet there lay the bridle
on which he was to be ridden back to France. For the Genoese never
forgave him his threat, which stood before them day by day, so that at
the first opportunity, Julius II, Pope and warrior, helping them, they
rose again, and again the French departed. And in 1515 Louis died, and
Francis I ruled in his stead. Then, the nobles of Genoa quarrelling as
ever among themselves, Fregoso agreed with the French king, who made him
governor of the city. The Adorni, angry at this, made overtures to the
Emperor, Charles V it was, who sent General Pescara and twenty thousand
men to take the city. There followed that most bloody sack, to the cry
of Spain and Adorni, which lives in history and in the hearts of the
Genoese to this day. This happened in 1522, and thereafter Antoniotto
Adorni became Doge as a reward for his treachery.

But already the deliverer was at hand, scarcely to be distinguished at
first from an enemy. Five years were the length of Adorni's rule, and
all that time the French attacked and strove for the city, and in their
ranks fought he who was the deliverer, Andrea Doria, Lord Admiral of
Genoa, the saviour of his country.

Then in 1527 the French got possession of Genoa. Now Filippino Doria,
nephew to the Admiral, had won a victory in the Gulf of Palermo over
the Spanish fleet. But Francis, that brilliant fool, thought nothing of
this service, though he claimed the prisoners for himself, for he liked
the ransom well. Then the Admiral, touched in his pride, threw over the
French cause and joined the Emperor. In 1528 a common action between the
fleet under Doria and the populace within the city once more threw out
the French, and Doria entered Genoa amid the acclamation of the
multitude, knight of the Golden Fleece and Prince of Melfi.

This extraordinary and heroic sailor, born at Oneglia in 1466 or 1468 of
one of the princely houses of Genoa, before 1503 had served under many
Italian lords. It was in 1513 that he first had the command of the fleet
of Genoa, while three years later he defeated the Turks at Pianosa. He
helped Francis into Genoa and he threw him out; while he lived he ruled
the city he had twice subdued, and his glory was hers. Yet truly it
might seem that all Doria did was but to transfer Genoa from the
Spaniard to the Frenchman and back again. In reality, he won her for
himself. He drove the French not only out of Genoa, but out of her
dominion. He filled up the port of Savona with stones, because she had
under French influence sought to rival Genoa. With him Genoa ruled the
sea, and with his death her greatness departed. And he was as liberal as
he was powerful. Charles V knew him, and let him alone. He himself as
Lord of Genoa gave her back her liberties, set up the Senate again,
opened the Golden Book, Il Libro d'Oro, and wrote in it the names of
those who should rule; then he set up a parliament, the Grand Council of
Four Hundred, and the old quarrels were forgotten, and there was peace.

But who could rule the Genoese, greedy as their sea, treacherous as
their winds, proud as their sun, deep as their sky, cruel as their
rocks! If the Admiral had brought the Adorni and the Fregosi low, there
yet remained the Fieschi, old as the Doria, Guelph too, while they had
been Ghibelline.

It is true that the old quarrels were done with, yet strangely enough it
was on the Pope's behalf that the Fieschi plotted against the Doria.
Now, Pope Paul III had been Doria's friend. In 1535 he had for a
remembrance of his love given the Admiral that great sword which still
hangs in S. Matteo. But now, when Andrea's brother, Abbate di San
Fruttuoso came to die, and it was known that he had left the Admiral
much property close to Naples, the Pope, swearing that the estates of an
ecclesiastic necessarily returned to the Church, claimed Andrea's
inheritance. But the Admiral thought differently. Ordering Giannettino,
his nephew, to take the fleet to Civitavecchia, he seized the Pope's
galleys and had them brought to Genoa. Now, when the Genoese saw this
strange capture convoyed into Genoa--so the tale goes--they were afraid,
and crowded round the old Admiral, demanding wherefore he made war on
the Church, and some shouted sacrilege and others profanation, while
others again besought him with tears what it meant. And he answered, so
that all might hear, that it meant that his galleys were stronger than
those of His Holiness.

Then the Pope, knowing his man, gave way, but forgot it not. So that he
called Gian Luigi Fieschi to him, the head of that family, a Guelph of a
Guelph stock, and put it into his mind to rise against the Admiral, and
to hold Genoa himself under the protection of Francis I. The blow fell
on 1st January 1547. Now, on the day before, the Admiral was unwell and
lay a bed, so that Fieschi waited on him in the most friendly way, and,
as it is said, kissed many times the two lads, grand-nephews of the
Admiral, who played about the room. Not many hours later, the Fieschi
were in the streets rousing the city. Giannettino, nephew to the
Admiral, hearing the tumult, ran to the Porta S. Tommaso to hold it and
enter the city, but that gate was already lost, and he himself soon
dead. Truly, all seemed lost when Fieschi, going to seize the galleys,
slipped from a plank into the water, and his armour drowned him. Then
the House of Doria rallied, and their cry rang through the city; little
by little they thrust back their enemies, they hemmed them in, they
trod them under foot; before dawn all that were left of the Fieschi were
flying to Montobbio, their castle in the mountains. Thus the Admiral
gave peace to Genoa, nor was he content with the exile or death of his
foes, for he destroyed also all their palaces, villas, and castles,
spoiling thus half the city, and making way for the palaces which have
named Genoa the City of Palaces, and which we know to-day. For thirteen
years longer Andrea Doria reigned in Genoa, dying at last in 1560. And
at his death all that might make Genoa so proud departed with him. In
1565 she lost Chios, the last of her possessions in the East, and before
long she lay once more in the hands of foreigners, not to regain her
liberty till in 1860 Italy rose up out of chaos and her sea bore the
Thousand of Garibaldi to Sicily, to Marsala, to free the Kingdom.

IV

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.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Cf. P. Villari: Primi due Secoli della Storia di Firenze (2^o
Edizione), vol. i. p. 246.

[2] See Le Mesurier, _Genoa: Five Lectures_, Genoa, A. Donath, 1889, a
useful and informing book, to which I am indebted for more than one
curious fact.

[3] See Le Mesurier, _op. cit._ p. 82. Le Mesurier thinks that "this
angel" refers to "the central figure in a bas-relief" above the
inscription and below the right-hand window of the church.

[4] See Le Mesurier, _op. cit._ p. 98.

[5] See Le Mesurier, _op. cit._ p. 107.

[6] See Le Mesurier, _op. cit._ p. 78.

[7] See Justi, _Velasquez and his Times_ (English translation), 1880,
page 315, and Le Mesurier, _op. cit._, page 163.




II. ON THE WAY


It was already summer when, one morning, soon after sunrise, I set out
from Genoa for Tuscany. The road to Spezia along the Riviera di Levante,
among the orange groves and the olives, between the mountains and the
sea, is one of the most beautiful in Europe. Forgotten, or for the most
part unused, by the traveller who is the slave of the railway, it has
not the reputation of its only rivals, the Corniche road from Nice to
Mentone, the lovely highway from Castellamare to Sorrento, or the road
between Vietri and Amalfi, where the strange fantastic peaks lead you at
last to the solitary and beautiful desert of Paestum, where Greece seems
to await you entrenched in silence among the wild-flowers. And there,
too, on the road to Tuscany, after the pleasant weariness of the way,
which is so much longer than those others, some fragment of antiquity is
to be the reward of your journey, though nothing so fine as the deserted
holiness of Paestum, only the dust of the white temple of Aphrodite
crowning the western horn of Spezia, where it rises splendid out of the
sea in the sun of Porto Venere.

This forgotten way among the olive gardens on the lower slopes of the
mountains over the sea, seems to me more joyful than any other road in
the world. It leads to Italy. Within the gate where all the world is a
garden, the way climbs among the olives and oranges, fresh with the
fragrance of the sea, the perfume of the blossoms, to the land of
heart's desire, where Pisa lies in the plain under the sorrowful gesture
of mountains like a beautiful mutilated statue, where Arno, parted from
Tiber, is lost in the sea, dowered with the glory of Florence, the
tribute of the hills, the spoil of many streams, the golden kiss of the
sun; while Tuscany, splendid with light and joy, stands neither for God
nor for His enemies, but for man, to whom she has given everything
really without an afterthought, the songs that shall not be forgotten;
the pictures full of youth; and above all Beauty, that on a night in
spring came to her from Greece as it is said among the vineyards, before
the vines had budded. For even as Love came to us from heaven, and was
born in a stable among the careful oxen, where a few poor shepherds
found a Mother with her Child, so Beauty was born in a vineyard in the
earliest dawn, when some young men came upon the hard white precious
body of a goddess, and drew her from the earth, and began to worship
her. Then in their hearts Beauty stirred, as Love did in the hearts of
the shepherds and the kings. Nor was that vision, so full of wisdom (a
vision of birth or resurrection, was it?) less fruitful than that other
so full of Love, when Mary, coming in the twilight of dawn, saw the
angel and heard his voice, and after weeping in the garden, heard Love
Himself call her by name. Well, if the resurrection of God was revealed
in Palestine, it was here among the Tuscan hills that man rose from the
dead and first saw the beauty of the flowers and the mystery of the
hills. Here, too, is holy land if you but knew it, full of old forgotten
gods, out-fashioned deities beside whose shrines, though they be hushed,
you may still hear the prayers of worshippers, the tears of desire, the
laughter of the beloved. For the old gods are not dead. Though they be
forgotten and the voice of Jesus full of sorrowful promises has beguiled
the world, still every morning is Aphrodite new born in the spume of the
sea, and in many an isle forsaken you may catch the notes of Apollo's
lyre, while Dionysus, in the mysterious heat of midday when the
husbandman is sleeping, still steals among the grapes, and Demeter even
yet in the sunset seeks Persephone among the sheaves of corn. If Jesus
wanders in the ways of the city to comfort those who have forgotten the
sun, in the woods the gods are still upon their holy thrones, and their
love constraineth us. Immortal and beloved, how should they pass away,
for, beside their secret places, of old we have hushed our voices, and
children have played with them no less than with Jesus of Nazareth. The
gods pass, only their gifts remain, the sun and the hills and the sea,
but in us they are immortal, not one have we suffered to creep away into
oblivion.

Thus I, thinking of the way, came to Nervi. Now the way from Genoa out
of the Pisan gate to Nervi is none of the pleasantest, being suburb all
the way; but those eight _chilometri_ over and done with, there is
nothing but delight between you and Spezia. Nervi itself, that
surprising place where beauty is all gathered into a nosegay of sea and
seashore, will not keep you long, for the sun is high, and the road is
calling, and the heat to come; moreover, the beautiful headland of
Portofino seems to shut out all Italy from your sight. Once there, you
tell yourself, what may not be seen, the Carrara hills, Spezia perhaps,
even Pisa maybe, miles and miles away, where Arno winds through the
marshes behind the Pineta to the sea. Now, whether or not in your heart
of hearts you hope for Pisa, a white peak of Carrara you certainly hope
to see, and that ... why, that is Tuscany. So you set out, leaving Genoa
and her suburb at last behind you, and, climbing among olive groves,
orange gardens, and flaming oleanders, with here a magnolia heavy with
blossom, there a pomegranate mysterious with fruit and flowers, after
another five miles you come to Recco, a modest, sleepy village, where it
is good to eat and rest. In the afternoon you may very pleasantly take
boat for Camogli, that ancient seafaring place, full of the débris of
the sea, old masts and ropes, here a rusty anchor, there a golden net,
with sailors lying asleep on the parapet of the harbour, and the whole
place full of the soft sea wind, languorous and yet virile withal, the
shady narrow ways, the low archways, the crooked steps pleasant with the
song of the sea, the rhythm of the waters.

In the cool of the afternoon you leave Camogli and climb by the byways
to Ruta, whence you may see all the Gulf of Genoa, with the proud city
herself in the lap of the mountains, and there, yes, far away, you may
see the stainless peaks of Tuscany, whiter than snow, shining in the
quiet afternoon; and nearer, but still far away, the crest of the horn
of Spezia, with the ruined church of Porto Venere--a church or a temple,
is it?--on the headland beside the island of Palmaria. Beside you are
the sea and the hills, two everlasting things, with here an old villa,
beautiful with many autumns, in a grove of cypress, ilex, and myrtle,
those three holy trees that mark death, mystery, and love; while far
down on the seashore where the foam is whitest, stands a little ruined
chapel in which the gulls cry all day long. But your heart turns ever
toward Italy yonder--towards the hills of marble. Will one ever reach
them, those far-away pure peaks immaculate in silence, like a thought of
God in the loneliness of the mountains? Far away below you lies Rapallo
in the crook of the bay among the oleanders and vines. It is there you
must sleep, far away still from those visionary peaks, which yet will in
some strange way give you a sense of security, as though a legion of
bright angels, ghosts in the pale night (for they fade away in the
twilight), invisible to other men, were on guard to keep you from all
harm. Somehow it is always into a dreamless sleep one falls in Rapallo,
that beautiful and guarded place behind Portofino, where the sea is like
a lake, so still it is, and all the flowers of the world seem to have
run for shelter. It is as though one had seen the Holy City, and though
it was still far off, it was enough, one was content.

[Illustration: ON THE ROAD]

Rapallo itself, as you find on your first morning, is beautiful, chiefly
by reason of its sea-girt tower. The old castle is a prison, and the
town itself, full of modern hotels, is yet brisk with trade in oil and
lace; but it is not these things that will hold you there, but that
sea-tower and the joy of the woods and gardens. And then there are some
surprising things not far away. Portofino, for instance, with its great
pine and the ilex woods, its terraced walk and the sea, not the lake of
Rapallo, but the sea itself, full of strength and wisdom. Then there
is San Fruttuoso, with its convent among the palm trees by the seashore,
whither the Doria are still brought by sea for burial. Here they lie,
generation on generation, of the race which loved the sea; almost
coffined in the deep, for the waves break upon the floor of the crypt
that holds them. They could not lie more fitly than on the shore of this
sea they won and held for Genoa. San Fruttuoso is difficult to reach
save by sea. In the summer the path from Portofino is pleasant enough,
but at any other time it is almost impassable. And indeed the voyage by
boat from Rapallo to Portofino, and thence to San Fruttuoso, should be
chosen, for the beauty of the coast, which, as I think, can nowhere be
seen so well and so easily as here. Then, in returning to Portofino, the
road along the coast should be followed through Cervara, where Guido,
the friend of Petrarch and founder of the convent, lies buried, where
Francis I, prisoner of Charles V, was wind-bound, to S. Margherita, the
sister-town of Rapallo, and thence through S. Michele di Pagana, where
you may see a spoiled Vandyck, to Rapallo. Who may speak of all the
splendid valleys and gardens that lie along this shore, for they are
gardens within a garden, and where all the world is so fair it is not of
any private pleasaunce that one thinks, but of the hills and the
wild-flowers and the sea, the garden of God.

And if the road, so far, from Genoa beggars description, so that I have
thought to leave it almost without a word, what can I hope to say of the
way from Rapallo to Chiavari? Starting early, perhaps in the company of
a peasant who is returning to his farm among the olives, you climb, in
the genial heat, among the lower slopes between the great hills and the
sea, along terraces of olives, through a whole long day of sunshine,
with the song of the cicale ever in your ears, the mysterious
long-drawn-out melody of the _rispetti_ of the peasant girls reaching
you ever. And then from the stillness among the olives, where the shade
is delicate and fragile, of silver and gold, and the streams creep
softly down to the sea, the evening will come as you pass along the
winding ways of Chiavari, for in the golden weather one is minded to go
softly. So in the twilight pursuing your way you follow the beautiful
road to Sestri-Levante, where again you are within sound of the sea that
breaks on the one side on a rocky and lofty shore, and on the other
creeps softly into a flat beach, the town itself rising on the
promontory between these two bays. There, under the headland among the
woods, you may find a chapel of black and white marble, surely the haunt
of Stella Maris, who has usurped the place of Aphrodite.

Many days might be spent among the woods of Sestri, but the road calls
from the mountains, and it is ever of Tuscany that you think as you set
out at last, leaving the sea behind you for the hills, climbing into the
Passo di Bracco, that, as it seems, alone divides you from the land you
seek. It is a far journey from Sestri to Spezia, but with a good horse,
in spite of the hill, you may cover it in a single long day from sunrise
to sunset. The climb begins almost at once, and continues really for
some eighteen miles, till Baracchino and the Osteria Baracca are
reached, in a desolate region of mountains that stretch away for ever,
billow on billow. Then you descend only to mount again through the
woods, till evening finds you at La Foce, the last height before Spezia;
and suddenly at a turning of the way the sunset flames before you,
staining all the sea with colour, and there lies Tuscany, those fragile,
stainless peaks of Carrara faintly glowing in the evening sun purple and
blue and gold, with here a flush as of dawn, there the heart of the
sunset. And all before you lies the sea, with Spezia and the great ships
in its arms; while yonder, like a jewel on the cusp of a horn, Porto
Venere shines; and farther still, Lerici in the shadow of the hills
washed by the sea, stained by the blood of the sunset, its great castle
seeming like some splendid ship in the midst of the waters. From the
bleak height of La Foce, whence all the woods seem to have run down to
the shore, slowly one by one the lights of the city appear like great
golden night flowers; soon they are answered from the bay, where the
ships lie solemnly, sleepily at anchor, and at last the great light of
the Pharos throws its warning over sea and seashore; and gathering in
the distance on the far horizon, the night splendid with blue and gold,
overwhelms the world, bringing coolness and as it were a sort of
reconciliation. So it is quite dark when, weary, at last you find
yourself in Spezia at the foot of the Tuscan hills.

Spezia is a modern city which has obliterated the more ancient
fortresses, whose ruins still guard the two promontories of her gulf.
The chief naval station in Italy, she has crowned all the heights and
islands with forts, and in many a little creek hidden away, you
continually come upon warships, naval schools, hospitals, and such,
while in her streets the sailors and soldiers mingle together, giving
the town a curiously modern character, for indeed there is little else
to call your attention. The beautiful bay which lies between Porto
Venere and Lerici behind the line of islands, that are really
fortifications, is, in spite of every violation, a spectacle of
extraordinary beauty, and in the old days--not so long ago, after
all--when the woods came down to the sea, and Spezia was a tiny village,
less even than Lerici is to-day, it must have been one of the loveliest
and quietest places in the world. Shut out from Italy by the range of
hills that runs in a semicircle from horn to horn of her bay, in those
days there were just sun and woods and sea, with a few half pagan
peasants and fishermen to break the immense silence. And, as it seems to
me, by reason of some magic which still haunts this mysterious seashore,
it is ever that world half pagan that you seek, leaving Spezia very
gladly every morning for San Terenzo and Lerici for Porto Venere and the
enchanted coast.

Leaving Spezia very early in the morning, there is nothing more
delightful than the voyage across the land-locked bay, past the
beautiful headlands and secret coves, to San Terenzo and Lerici. If you
leave the steamer at San Terenzo, you may walk along a sort of seawall,
built out of the cliff and boulders of the shore, round more than one
little promontory, to Lerici, whose castle seems to guard the Tuscan
sea. Walking thus along the shore, you pass the Villa Magni, Shelley's
house, standing, not as it used to do, up out of the sea, for the road
has been built really in the waves; but in many ways the same still, for
instance with the broad balcony on the first storey, which pleased
Shelley so much; and though a second storey has been added since, and
even the name of the house changed, a piece of vandalism common enough
in Italy to-day, where, since they do not even spare their own
traditions and ancient landmarks, it would be folly to expect them to
preserve ours, still you may visit the rooms in which he lived with
Mary, and where he told Claire of the death of Allegra.

The house stands facing the sea in the deepest part of the bay, nearer
to San Terenzo than to Lerici. Both Trelawney and Williams had been
searching all the spring for a summer villa for the Shelleys, who, a
little weary perhaps of Byron's world, had determined to leave Pisa and
to spend the summer on the Gulf of Spezia. Byron was about to establish
himself just beyond Livorno, on the slopes of Montenero, in a huge and
rambling old villa with eighteenth century frescoes on the walls, and a
tangled park and garden running down to the dusty Livorno highway. The
place to-day is a little dilapidated, and its statues broken, but in the
summer months it becomes the paradise of a school of girls, a fact which
I think might have pleased Byron.

However, the Shelleys were thinking of no such faded splendour as Villa
Dupoy for their summer retreat. "Shelley had no pride or vanity to
provide for," says Trelawney, "yet we had the greatest difficulty in
finding any house in which the humblest civilised family could exist.

"On the shores of this superb bay, only surpassed in its natural beauty
and capability by that of Naples, so effectually had tyranny paralysed
the energies and enterprise of man, that the only indication of human
habitation was a few most miserable fishing villages scattered along the
margin of the bay. Near its centre, between the villages of San Terenzo
and Lerici, we came upon a lonely and abandoned building called the
Villa Magni, though it looked more like a boat or bathing house than a
place to live in. It consisted of a terrace or ground-floor unpaved, and
used for storing boat-gear and fishing-tackle, and of a single storey
over it, divided into a hall or saloon and four small rooms which had
once been white-washed; there was one chimney for cooking. This place we
thought the Shelleys might put up with for the summer. The only good
thing about it was a verandah facing the sea, and almost over it. So we
sought the owner and made arrangements, dependent on Shelley's approval,
for taking it for six months."

Shelley at once decided to accept the offer of this house, though it was
unfurnished. Mary and Claire presently set out for Spezia, Shelley
remaining in Pisa to manage the removal of the furniture. He reached
Lerici on 28th April, writing, immediately on his arrival, to Mary in
Spezia.

_April 28, 1822_.

"DEAREST MARY,--I am this moment arrived at Lerici, where I am
necessarily detained waiting the furniture, which left Pisa last night
at midnight; and as the sea has been calm and the wind fair, may expect
them every moment.... Now to business--Is the Magni House taken? if not
pray occupy yourself instantly in finishing the affair, even if you are
obliged to go to Sarzana, and send a messenger to me to tell me of your
success. I, of course, cannot leave Lerici, to which place the boats
(for we were obliged to take two) are directed. But _you_ can come over
in the same boat that brings this letter, and return in the evening.

"I ought to say that I do not think there is accommodation for you all
at this inn; and that even if there were, you would be better off at
Spezia; but if the Magni House is taken, then there is no possible
reason why you should not take a row over in the boat that will bring
this, but don't keep the men long. I am anxious to hear from you on
every account.--Ever yours, S."

Shelley's fears as to the accommodation of Lerici were by no means
without foundation. Within the last two years a decent inn has been open
there in the summer, but before that the primitive and not very clean
hostelry in which, as I suppose, Shelley lodged, was all that awaited
the traveller.[8] It was not for long, however, that Shelley was left in
doubt about the house. Villa Magni became his, and, after much trouble
with the furniture, for the officials put the customs duty at £300
sterling, they were allowed to bring it ashore, the harbour-master
agreeing to consider Villa Magni "as a sort of depôt, until further
leave came from the Genoese Government."

It was here that, very soon after they had taken possession of the
house, Claire learned from Shelley's lips of the death of her child, and
on 21st May set out for Florence. A few evenings later, Shelley, walking
with Williams on the terrace, and observing the effect of the moonshine
on the water, grasped Williams, as he says, "violently by the arm and
stared steadfastly on the white surf that broke upon the beach at our
feet. Observing him sensibly affected, I demanded of him if he were in
pain; but he only answered by saying, 'There it is again--there!' He
recovered after some time, and declared that he saw, as plainly as he
then saw me, a naked child (Allegra) rise from the sea and clap its
hands as in joy, smiling at him." Was this a premonition of his own
death, a hint, as it were, that in such a place one like Shelley might
well hope for from the gods? Certainly that shore was pagan enough.
Sometimes on moonlight nights, in the hot weather, the half savage
natives of San Terenzo would dance among the waves, singing in chorus;
while Mrs. Shelley tells us that the beauty of the woods made her "weep
and shudder." So strong and vehement was her dread that she preferred to
go out in the boat which she feared, rather than to walk among the paths
and alleys of the trees hung with vines, or in the mysterious silence of
the olives.

Thus began that happy last summer of Shelley's life. Day by day, he,
with Trelawney and Williams, watched for that fatal plaything, the
little boat _Ariel_, which Trelawney had drawn in her actual dimensions
for him on the sands of Arno, while he, with a map of the Mediterranean
spread before him, sitting in this imaginary ship, had already made
wonderful voyages. And one day as he paced the terrace with Williams,
they saw her round the headland of Porto Venere. Twenty-eight feet long
by eight she was: built in Genoa from an English model that Williams,
who had been a sailor, had brought with him. Without a deck,
schooner-rigged, it took, says Trelawney, "two tons of iron ballast to
bring her down to her bearings, and then she was very crank in a breeze,
though not deficient in beam." Truly Shelley was no seaman. "You will do
no good with Shelley," Trelawney told Williams, "until you heave his
books and papers overboard, shear the wisps of hair that hang over his
eyes, and plunge his arms up to the elbows in a tar bucket." But he
said, "I can read and steer at the same time." Read and steer! But
indeed it was on this very bay, and almost certainly in the _Ariel_,
that he wrote those perfect lines: "She left me at the silent time."

It was here too, in Lerici, that Shelley wrote "The Triumph of Life,"
that splendid fragment in _terza rima_, which is like a pageant suddenly
broken by the advent of Death: that ends with the immortal question--

    "Then, what is life? I cried,"

which was for ever to remain unanswered, for he had gone, as he said,
"to solve the great mystery." Well, the story is an old one, I shall not
tell it again; only here in the bay of Lerici, with his words in my
ears, his house before me, and the very terrace where he worked, the
ghost of that sorrowful and splendid spirit seems to wander even yet.
What was it that haunted this shore, full of foreboding, prophesying
death?

It was to meet Leigh Hunt that Shelley set out on 1st July with Williams
in the _Ariel_ for Leghorn. For weeks the sky had been cloudless, full
of the mysterious light, which is, as it seems to me, the most beautiful
and the most splendid thing in the world. In all the churches and by the
roadsides they were praying for rain. Shelley had been in Pisa with Hunt
showing him that most lovely of all cathedrals, and, listening to the
organ there, he had been led to agree that a truly divine religion might
even yet be established if Love were really made the principle of it
instead of Faith. On the afternoon following that serene day at Pisa, he
set sail for Lerici from Leghorn with Williams and the boy Charles
Vivian. Trelawney was on the _Bolivar_, Byron's yacht, at the time, and
saw them start. His Genoese mate, watching too, turned to him and said,
"They should have sailed this morning at three or four instead of now;
they are standing too much inshore; the current will set them there."
Trelawney answered, "They will soon have the land-breeze." "Maybe,"
continued the mate, "she will soon have too much breeze; that gaff
topsail is foolish in a boat with no deck and no sailor on board." Then,
pointing to the south-west,--"Look at those black lines and the dirty
rags hanging on them out of the sky--they are a warning; look at the
smoke on the water; the devil is brewing mischief." Then the mist which
had hung all day in the offing swallowed the _Ariel_ for ever.

It was not until many days after this, Trelawney tells us, "that my
worst fears were confirmed. Two bodies were found on the shore--one near
Viareggio, which I went and examined. The face and hands and parts of
the body not protected by the dress were fleshless. The tall, slight
figure, the jacket, the volume of Aeschylus in one pocket, and Keats'
poems[9] in the other, doubled back, as if the reader, in the act of
reading, had hastily thrust it away, were all too familiar to me to
leave a doubt in my mind that this mutilated corpse was any other than
Shelley's."

A certain light has been thrown on the manner in which Shelley and his
friend met their death in a letter which Mr. Eyre wrote to the _Times_
in 1875.[10] Trelawney had always believed that the Livorno sailors knew
more than they cared to tell of that tragedy. For one thing, he had seen
an English oar in one of their boats just after the storm; for another
the laws were such in Tuscany, that had a fishing-boat gone to the
rescue of the _Ariel_ and brought off the poet and his companions, she
would with her crew have been sent into quarantine for fear of cholera.
It is not, however, to the Duchy of Tuscany that Shelley owes his death,
but to the cupidity of the Tuscan sailors, one of them having confessed
to the crime of running down the boat, seeing her in danger, in the hope
of finding gold on "the milord Inglese." There seems but little reason
for doubting this story, which Vincent Eyre communicated to the _Times_
in 1875: Trelawney eagerly accepts it, and though Dr. Garnett and
Professor Dowden politely forbear to accuse the Italians, such crimes
appear to have been sufficiently common in those days to confirm us,
however reluctantly, in this explanation. Thus died perhaps the greatest
lyric poet that even England had ever borne, an exile, and yet not an
exile, for he died in Italy, the fatherland of us all. Ah! "'tis Death
is dead, not he," for in the west wind you may hear his song, and in the
tender night his rare mysterious music; when the skylark sings it is as
it were his melody, and in the clouds you may find something of the
refreshment of his spirit.

    "Nothing of him that doth fade
    But doth suffer a sea-change
    Into something rich and strange."

FOOTNOTES:

[8] For the identity of this inn see Leigh Hunt, _Autobiography_.
Constable, 1903, vol. ii. p. 123.

[9] The Keats was doubled open at the "Lamia."

[10] _Trelawney Records_. Pickering, 1878, pp. 197-200, accepts this
story, as clearing up what for fifty years had been a mystery to him.




III. PORTO VENERE


It is perhaps a more joyful day that may be spent at Porto Venere, the
little harbour on the northern shores of the gulf. Starting early you
come, still before the sea is altogether subject to the sun, to a little
bay of blue clear still water flanked by gardens of vines, of agaves and
olives. Here, in silence save for the lapping of the water, the early
song of the cicale, the far-away notes of a reed blown by a boy in the
shadow by the sea, you land, and, following the path by the hillside,
come suddenly on the little port with its few fishing-boats and litter
of ropes and nets, above which rises the little town, house piled on
house, from the ruined church rising high, sheer out of the sea to the
church of marble that crowns the hill. Before you stands the gate of
Porto Venere, a little Eastern in its dilapidation, its colour of faded
gold, its tower, and broken battlement. Passing under the ancient arch
past a shrine of Madonna, you enter the long shadowy street, where red
and green vegetables and fruits, purple grapes, and honey-coloured
_nespoli_ and yellow oranges are piled in the cool doorways, and the old
women sit knitting behind their stalls. Climbing thus between the houses
under that vivid strip of soft blue sky, the dazzling rosy beauty of the
ruined ramparts suddenly bursts upon you, and beyond and above them the
golden ruined church, and farther still, the glistening shining
splendour of the sea and the sun that has suddenly blotted out the soft
sky. A flight of broken steps leads to a ruined wall, along which you
pass to the old church, or temple is it, you ask yourself, so fair it
looks, and without the humility of a Christian building. To your
right, across a tossing strip of blue water, full of green and gold,
rises the island of Palmaria, and beyond that two other smaller islands,
Tisso and Tissetto, while to your left lies the whole splendid coast
shouting with waves, laughing in the sunshine and the wind of early
morning, and all before you spreads the sea. As I stood leaning on the
ruined wall looking on all this miracle of joy, a little child, who had
hidden among the wind-blown cornflowers and golden broom on the slope of
the cliffs, slowly crept towards me with many hesitations and shy
peerings; then, no longer afraid, almost naked as he was, he ran to me
and took my hand.

[Illustration: PORTO VENERE.

_Alinari_]

"Will the Signore see the church?" said he, pulling me that way.

The Signore was willing. Thus it was, hand in hand with Eros, that I
mounted the broken steps of the tower of Venus, his mother.

How may I describe the wonder of that place? For at last, he before, I
following, though he still held my hand, we came out of the stairway on
to a platform on the top of the tower surrounded by a broken battlement.
It was as though I had suddenly entered the last hiding-place of
Aphrodite herself. On the floor sat an old and lame man sharpening a
scythe, and beside him a little child lay among the broken corn that was
strewn over the whole platform. Where the battlements had once frowned,
now stood sheaves of smiling corn, golden and nodding in the wind and
the sun. Suddenly the lad who had led me hither seized the flail and
began to beat the corn and stalks strewn over the floor, while the old
man, quavering a little, sang a long-drawn-out gay melody, and the
little girl beat her tiny hands in time to the work and the music. Then,
unheard, into this miracle came a young woman,--ah, was it not
Persephone,--slim as an osier in the shadow, walking like a bright
peacock straight above herself, climbing the steps, and her hands were
on her hips and on her black head was a sheaf of corn. Then she breathed
deep, gazed over the blue sea, and set her burden down with its fellows
on the parapet, smiling and beating her hands at the little girl.

Porto Venere rises out of the sea like Tintagel--but a classic sea, a
sea covered with broken blossoms. It was evening when I returned again
to the Temple of Venus The moon was like a sickle of silver, far away
the waves fawned along the shore as though to call the nymphs from the
woods; the sun was set; out of the east night was coming. In the great
caves, full of coolness and mystery, the Tritons seemed to be playing
with sea monsters, while from far away I thought I heard the lamentable
voice of Ariadne weeping for Theseus. Ah no, they are not dead, the
beautiful, fair gods. Here, in the temple of Aphrodite, on the threshold
of Italy, I will lift up my heart. Though the songs we made are dead and
the dances forgotten, though the statues are broken, the temples
destroyed, still in my heart there is a song and in my blood a murmur as
of dancing, and I will carve new statues and rebuild the temples every
day. For I have loved you, O Gods, in the forests and on the mountains
and by the seashore. I, too, am fashioned out of the red earth, and all
the sea is in my heart, and my lover is the wind. As the rivers sing of
the sea, so will I sing till I find you. As the mountains wait for the
sun, so will I wait in the night of the city.

For my joy, and my lord the sun, I give you thanks, that he is splendid
and strong and beautiful beyond beauty. For the sea and all mysterious
things I give you thanks, that I have understood and am reconciled with
them. For the earth when the sun is set, for the earth when the sun is
risen, for the valleys and the hills, for the flowers and the trees, I
give you thanks, that I am one with them always and out of them was I
made. For the wind of morning, for the wind of evening, for the tender
night, for the growing day, take, then, my thanks, O Gods, for the
cypress, for the ilex, for the olive on the road to Italy in the sunset
and the summer.




IV. SARZANA AND LUNA


It was very early in the morning when I came into Tuscany. Leaving
Spezia overnight, I had slept at Lerici, and, waking in the earliest
still dawn, I had set out over the hills, hoping to cross the Macra
before breakfast.

In this tremulous and joyful hour, full of the profound gravity of youth
hesitating on the threshold of life, the day rose out of the sea; so, a
lily opening in a garden while we sleep transfigures it with its joy.

As I climbed the winding hill among the olives, while still a cool
twilight hung about the streets of Lerici, the sun stood up over the
sea, awakening it to the whole long day of love to come. Far away in the
early light, over a sea mysterious of blue and silver and full of
ecstasy, the coast curved with infinite beauty into the golden crest of
Porto Venere. Spezia, like a broken flower, seemed deserted on the
seashore, and Lerici itself, far below me, waking at morning, watched
the sleeping ships, the deep breathing of the sea, the shy and yet proud
gesture of the day.

Then as I crossed the ridge of the hill and began to follow the road
downward towards Tuscany between the still olives, where as yet the
world had not seen the sun, suddenly all that beautiful world, about to
be so splendid, was hidden from me, and instead I saw the delta of a
great river, the uplifted peaks of the marble mountains, and there was
Tuscany.

Past Arcola, that triumphal arch of the middle age, built on high like a
city on an aqueduct, I went into the plain; then far away in the
growing day I saw the ancient strongholds of the hills, the fortresses
of the Malaspina, the castles of the Lunigiana, the eyries of the eagles
of old time. There they lay before me on the hills like _le grandi
ombre_ of which Dante speaks, Castelnuovo di Magra, Fosdinovo of the
Malaspina, Niccola over the woods. Then at a turning of the way at the
foot of the hills I had traversed, under that long and lofty bridge that
has known so well the hasty footstep of the fugitive, flowed Magra.

    ... Macra, che, per cammin corto
    Lo genovese parte dal Toscano.

Thus with Dante's verses in my mouth I came into Tuscany.

Now the way from Macra to Sarzana lies straight across that great delta
which hides behind the eastern horn of the Gulf of Spezia. At the Macra
bridge you meet the old road from Genoa to Pisa, and entering Tuscany
thus, Sarzana is the first Tuscan city you will see. Luna Nova the
Romans called the place, for it was built to replace the older city
close to the sea, the ruins of which you may still find beside the road
on the way southward, but of Roman days there is nothing left in the new
city.

It was a fortress of Castruccio Castracani, the birthplace of a great
Pope. Of Castruccio, that intolerant great man, I shall speak later, in
Lucca, for that was the rose in his shield. Here I wish only to remind
the reader who wanders among the ruins of his great castle, that
Castracani took Sarzana by force and held it against any; and perhaps to
recall the words of Machiavelli, where he tells us that the capture of
Sarzana was a feat of daring done to impress the Lucchesi with the
splendour of their liberated tyrant. For when the citizens had freed him
from the prison of Uguccione della Faggiuola, who had seized the
government of Lucca, Castruccio, finding himself accompanied by a great
number of his friends, which encouraged him, and by the whole body of
the people, which flattered his ambition, caused himself to be chosen
Captain-General of all their forces for a twelvemonth; and resolving to
perform some eminent action that might justify their choice, he
undertook the reduction of several places which had revolted following
the example of Uguccione. Having for this purpose entered into strict
alliance with the city of Pisa, she sent him supplies, and he marched
with them to besiege Sarzana; but the place being very strong, before he
could carry it, he was obliged to build a fortress as near it as he
could. This new fort in two months' time rendered him master of the
whole country, and is the same fort that at this day is called
Sarzanella, repaired since and much enlarged by the Florentines.
Supported by the credit of so glorious an exploit, he reduced Massa,
Carrara, and Lavenza very easily: he seized likewise upon the whole
country of Lunigiana ... so that, full of glory, he returned to Lucca,
where the people thronged to meet him, and received him with all
possible demonstrations of joy.

It is, however, rather as the home of Nicholas V, I think, that Sarzana
appeals to us to-day, than as the stronghold of Castruccio. The tyrant
held so many places, as we shall see, his prowess is everywhere, but
Tommaso Parentucelli is like to be forgotten, for his glory is not
written in sword-cuts or in any violated city, but in the forgotten
pages of the humanists, the beautiful life of Vespasiano da Bisticci.
And was not Nicholas V. the first of the Renaissance Popes, the
librarian of Cosimo de' Medici, the tutor of the sons of Rinaldo degli
Albizzi and of Palla Strozzi? Certainly his great glory was the care he
had of learning and the arts: he made Rome once more the capital of the
world, he began the Vatican, and the basilica of S. Pietro, yet he was
not content till he should have transformed the whole city into order
and beauty. In him the enthusiasm and impulse of the Renaissance are
simple and full of freshness. Finding Rome still the city of the
Emperors and their superstition, he made it the city of man. He was the
friend of Alberti, the Patron of all men of learning and poets. "Greece
has not fallen," said Filelfo, in remembering him, "but seems to have
migrated to Italy, which of old was called Magna Graecia." Yet Tommaso
Parentucelli[11] was sprung of poor parent and even though they may have
been _nobili_ as Manetti tells us, _De nobili Parentucellorum
progenie_,[12] that certainly was of but little assistance to him in his
youth.

"Maestro Tomaso da Serezano," says Vespasiano the serene bookseller of
Florence, with something of Walton's charm--"Maestro Tomaso da Serezano,
who was afterwards Pope Nicholas V, was born at Pisa of humble parents.
Later on account of discord in that city, his father was imprisoned, so
that he went to Sarzana, and there gave to his little son in his tender
years lessons in grammar, which, through the excellence of his
understanding, he quickly learned. His father died, however, when he who
was to come to such eminence was but nine years old, leaving two sons,
our Maestro Tomaso, and Maestro Filippo, who later was Cardinal of
Bologna. Now Maestro Tomaso fell sick at that time, and his mother,
seeing him thus ailing, being a widow and having all her great hope in
her sons, was in the greatest anxiety and sorrow, and prayed God
unweariedly to spare her little son. Thus intent in prayer, hoping that
he would not die, she fell asleep about dawn, when One called to her and
said: 'Andreola (for that was her name), doubt nothing that thy son
shall live.' And it seemed in her vision that she saw her son in a
bishop's robe, and One said to her that he would be Pope. Waking then
from this dream, immediately she went to her little son and found him
already better, and to all those in the house she told the vision she
had had. Now, when the child was well, because of the steadfast hope
which the vision had given her, she at once begged him to pursue his
studies; which he did, so that when he was sixteen he had a very good
knowledge of grammar and the Latin tongue, and began to work at logic,
in order later to come at philosophy and theology. Then he left Sarzana
and went to Bologna, so that he might the better pursue his studies in
every faculty. At Bologna he studied in logic and in philosophy with
great success. In a short time he became learned in all the seven
Liberal Arts. Staying at Bologna still he was eighteen, and Master of
Arts, lacking money, it was necessary for him to go to Sarzana to his
mother, who had remarried, in order to have money to furnish his
expenses. She was poor and her husband not very rich, and then Tomaso
was not his son, but a stepson: he could not obtain money from them.
Determined to follow his studies, he thought to go to Florence, the
mother of studies and every virtue at that time. So he went thither, and
found Messer Rinaldo degli Albizzi, a most exceptional man, who carried
him off to instruct his sons, giving him a good salary as a young man of
great virtue. At the end of a year Messer Rinaldo left Florence, and
Maestro Tomaso wishing to remain in the city, he arranged for him to
enter the service of Messer Palla di Nofri Strozzi; and from him he had
a very good salary. At the end of another year he had gained so much
from these two citizens that he had enough to return to Bologna to his
studies, though in Florence he had not lost his time, for he read in
every faculty."

Such were the early years of one of the most cultured and princely of
the Popes. Born in 1398, he was himself one of the sons of the early
Renaissance. Not altogether without pedantry, he yet by his learning, by
his patronage of scholars and artists (and indeed he was perhaps the
first Pope who preferred them to monks and friars), secured for the
Renaissance the allegiance of the Church. He died in a moment of
misfortune for Europe in 1455, just after the fall of Constantinople,
being succeeded on the throne of Christendom by Pius II, Pius Aeneas as
he called himself in a moment of enthusiasm, one of the most human of
all those men of the world who have become the vicegerent of Jesus.
Nicholas V was not a man of the world, he was a scholar, full of the
enthusiasm of his day. As a statesman, while he pacified Italy, he saw
Byzantium fall into the hands of the barbarians. He was a Pagan in whom
there was no guile. His enthusiasm was rather for Apollo and the Muses
than for Jesus and the Saints. With a simplicity touching and
delightful, he watched Sigismondo Malatesta build his temple at Rimini,
and was his friend and loved him well. Pius II, with all his love of
nature and the classics, though his own life was full of unfortunate
secrets and his pride and vanity truly Sienese, could not look on
unmoved while Malatesta built a temple to the old gods in the States of
the Church. But then Pius had not lived all the long years of his youth
at Luna Nova. Who can tell what half-forgotten deity may have found
Maestro Tomaso asleep in the woods, that magician Virgil in his
hands,--for on this coast the gods wander even yet,--and, creeping
behind him, finding him so fair, may have kissed him on the ears, as the
snakes kissed Cassandra when she lay asleep at noon in Troy of old.
Certainly their habitations, their old places may still be found. We are
not so far from Porto Venere, and then on the highway towards Massa, not
long after you have come out of the beautiful avenue of plane trees,
itself like some great temple, through which the road leaves Sarzana,
you come upon the little city of Luna, or the bright fragments of it,
among the sand of what must once have been the seashore, with here a
fold of the old amphitheatre, there the curve of the circus, while
scattered on the grass softer than sleep, you may find perhaps the
carved name of a goddess, the empty pedestal of a statue.

Lying there on a summer day in the everlasting quietness, unbroken even
by a wandering wind or the ripple of a stream, some inkling of that old
Roman life, always at its best in such country places as this, comes to
you, yes, from the time when Juno was yet a little maid among the mossy
fountains and the noise of the brooks. Tacitus in his _Agricola_, that
consoling book, tells us of those homes of a refined and severe
simplicity in Frejus and Como, but it is to Rutilius, with his strange
gift of impressionism, you must go for a glimpse of Luna. In his
perfect verses[13] we may see the place as he found it when, gliding
swiftly on the waves, perhaps on a day like this, he came to those walls
of glistening marble, which got their name from the planet that borrows
her light from the sun, her brother. The country itself furnished those
stones which shamed with their whiteness the laughing lilies, while
their polished surface with its veins threw forth shining rays. For this
is a land rich in marbles which defy, sure of their victory, the virgin
whiteness of the snow itself.

Well, there is but little left of that shining city, and yet, as I lay
dreaming in the grass-grown theatre, it seemed to be a festal day, and
there among the excited and noisy throng of holiday-makers, just for a
moment I caught sight of the aediles in their white tunics, and then,
far away, the terrified face of a little child, frightened at the
hideous masks of the actors. Then, the performance over, I followed home
some simple old centurion was it?--who, returned from the wars on the
far frontier, had given the city a shady walk and that shrine of
Neptune. We came at last to a country house of "pale red and yellow
marble," half farm, half villa, lying away from the white road at the
point where it begins to decline somewhat sharply to the marshland
below. It is close to the sea. Large enough for all requirements, and
not expensive to keep in repair, my host explains. At its entrance is a
modest but beautiful hall; then come the cloisters, which are rounded
into the likeness of the letter D, and these enclose a small and pretty
courtyard. These cloisters, I am told, are a fine refuge in a storm, for
they are protected by windows and deep over-hanging eaves. Facing the
cloisters is a cheerful inner court, then the dining-room towards the
seashore, fine enough for anyone, as my host asserts, and when the
south-west wind is blowing the room is just scattered by the spray of
the spent waves. On all sides are folding doors, or windows quite as
large as doors, so that from two sides and the front you command a
prospect of three seas as it were; while at the back, as he shows me,
one can see through the inner court to the woods or the distant hills.
Just then the young mistress of the place comes to greet me, bidden by
my host her father, and in a moment I see the nobility of this life,
full of pure and honourable things, together with a certain simplicity
and sweetness. Seeing my admiration, my host speaks of his daughter, of
her love for him, of her delight in his speeches,--for he is of
authority in the city,--of how on such occasions she will sit screened
from the audience by a curtain, drinking in what people say to his
credit. He smiles as he tells me this, adding she has a sharp wit, is
wonderfully economical, and loves him well; and indeed she is worthy of
him, and doubtless, as he says, of her grandfather. Then my proud old
centurion leads me down the alleys of his garden full of figs and
mulberries, with roses and a few violets, till in the perfect stillness
of this retreat we come to the seashore, and there lies the white city
of Luna glistening in the sun. As I take my leave, reluctantly, for, I
would stay longer, my hostess is so sweet, my host so charming, I catch
sight of the name of the villa cut into the rosy marble of the gates:
"Ad Vigilias Albas" I read, and then and then ... Why, what is this? I
must have fallen asleep in that old theatre among the débris and the
fine grass. Ad Vigilias Albas--"White Nights," nights not of quite blank
forgetfulness, certainly. But it is with the ancestors of Marius I seem
to have been talking in the old city of Luna, that in his day had
already passed away.[14]

It was sunset when I found myself at the door of the Inn in Sarzana.

FOOTNOTES:

[11] Even the name is uncertain. In the Duomo here, in Cappella di S.
Tommaso, you may find his mother's grave, on which she is called
Andreola dei Calandrini. His uncle, however, is called J.P.
Parentucelli. In two Bulls of Felix V he is called Thomas de
Calandrinis; cf. Mansi, xxxi. 190.

[12] Muratori, _Rer. Ital. Scrip._, III. ii. 107.

[13] Sed deverticulo fuimus fortasse loquaces:
     Carmine propositum jam repetamus iter.
     Advehimur celeri candentia moenia lapsu:
     Nominis est auctor sole corusca soror.
     Indigenis superat ridentia lilia saxis,
     Et levi radiat picta nitore silex.
     Dives marmoribus tellus, quae luce coloris
     Provocat intactas luxuriosa nives.

[14] You may see the place to-day--but it is of plaster now--as Pater
describes it.--_Marius the Epicurian_, vol. i. 20.




V. CARRARA, MASSA DUCALE, PIETRA-SANTA, VIAREGGIO


And truly it is into a city of marble that you come, when, following the
dusty road full of the ruts of the bullock-wagons, past Avenza, that
little city with a great castle of Castruccio Castracani, after climbing
into the gorge where the bullocks, a dozen of them it may be, yoked to a
single dray, take all the way, you enter the cold streets of Carrara,
that are always full of the sound of falling water. And strangely
enough, as one may think, in this far-away place, so close to the
mountains as to be littered by their débris, it is an impression of
business and of life that you receive beyond anything of the sort to be
found in Spezia. Not a beautiful city certainly, Carrara has a little
the aspect of an encampment, an encampment that has somehow become
permanent, where everything has been built in a hurry, as it were, of
the most precious and permanent material. So that, while the houses are
of marble, they seem to be with but few exceptions mere shanties without
beauty of any sort, that were built yesterday for shelter, and to-morrow
will be destroyed. It is true that the Church of S. Andrea is a building
of the thirteenth century, in the Gothic manner, with a fine façade and
sculptures of a certain merit, but it fails to impress itself on the
town, which is altogether alien from it, modern for the most part in the
vulgar way of our time, when ornament is a caprice of the rich and
merely ostentatious, the many living, without beauty or light, in
barracks or huts of a brutal and hideous uniformity.

It was a Sunday evening when I came to Carrara; all that world of
labouring men and women was in the streets; in the piazza a band played;
close to the hotel, in a tent set up for the occasion, a particularly
atrocious collection of brass instruments were being blown with might
and main to attract the populace to a marionette performance. The whole
world seemed dizzy with noise. After dinner I went out into the streets
among the people, but it was not any joy I found there, only a mere
brutal cessation from toil, in which amid noise and confusion, the
labourer sought to forget his labour. More and more as I went among them
it seemed to me that the mountains had brutalised those who won from
them their snowy treasure. In all Carrara and the valley of Torano I saw
no beautiful or distinguished faces,--the women were without sweetness,
the men a mere gang of workmen. Now, common as this is in any
manufacturing city of the North, it is very uncommon in Italy, where
humanity has not been injured and enslaved by machinery as it has with
us. You may generally find beauty, sweetness, or wisdom in the faces of
a Tuscan crowd in any place. Only here you will see the man who has
become just the fellow-labourer of the ox.

I understood this better when, about four o'clock on the next morning, I
went in the company of a lame youth into the quarries themselves. There
are some half-dozen of them, glens of marble that lead you into the
heart of the mountains, valleys without shade, full of a brutal
coldness, an intolerable heat, a dazzling light, a darkness that may be
felt. Torano, that little town you come upon at the very threshold of
the quarries, is like a town of the Middle Age, full of stones and
refuse and narrow ways that end in a blind nothingness, and low houses
without glass in the windows, and dogs and cats and animals of all
sorts, goats and chickens and pigs, among which the people live. Thus
busy with the frightful labour among the stones in the heart of the
mountains, where no green thing has ever grown or even a bird built her
nest, where in summer the sun looks down like some enormous moloch, and
in winter the frost and the cold scourge them to their labour in the
horrid ghostly twilight, the people work. The roads are mere tracks
among the blocks and hills of broken marble, yellow, black, and white
stones, that are hauled on enormous trolleys by a line of bullocks in
which you may often find a horse or a pony. Staggering along this way of
torture, sweating, groaning, rebelling, under the whips and curses and
kicks of the labourers, who either sit cursing on the wagon among the
marble, or, armed with great whips, slash and cut at the poor capering,
patient brutes, the oxen drag these immense wagons over the sharp
boulders and dazzling rocks, grinding them in pieces, cutting themselves
with sharp stones, pulling as though to break their hearts under the
tyranny of the stones, not less helpless and insensate than they. Here
and there you may see an armed sentry, as though in command of a gang of
convicts, here and there an official of some society for the protection
of animals, but he is quite useless. Whether he be armed to quell a
rebellion or to put the injured animals out of their pain, I know not.
In any case, he is a sign of the state of life in these valleys of
marble. Out of this insensate hell come the impossible statues that grin
about our cities. Here, cut by the most hideous machinery with a noise
like the shrieking of iron on iron, the mantelpieces and washstands of
every jerry-built house and obscene emporium of machine-made furniture
are sawn out of the rock. There is no joy in this labour, and the
savage, harsh yell of the machines drowns any song that of old might
have lightened the toil. Blasted out of the mountains by slaves, some
13,000 of them, dragged by tortured and groaning animals, the marble
that might have built a Parthenon is sold to the manufacturer to
decorate the houses of the middle classes, the studios of the
incompetent, the streets of our trumpery cities. Do you wonder why
Carrara has never produced a sculptor? The answer is here in the
quarries that, having dehumanised man, have themselves become obscene.
The frightful leprous glare of crude whiteness that shines in every
cemetery in Europe marks only the dead; the material has in some
strange way lost its beauty, and with the loss of beauty in the material
the art of sculpture has been lost. These thousands of slaves who are
hewing away the mountains are ludicrous and ridiculous in their
brutality and absurdity. They have sacrificed their humanity for no end.
The quarries are worked for money, not for art. The stone is cut not
that Rodin may make a splendid statue, but that some company may earn a
dividend. As you climb higher and higher, past quarry after quarry, it
is a sense of slavery and death that you feel. Everywhere there is
struggle, rebellion, cruelty; everywhere you see men, bound by ropes,
slung over the dazzling face of the cliffs, hacking at the mountains
with huge iron pikes, or straining to crash down a boulder for the ox
wagons. As you get higher an anxious and disastrous silence surrounds
you, the violated spirit of the mountains that has yielded itself only
to the love of Michelangelo seems to be about to overwhelm you in some
frightful tragedy. In the shadowless cool light of early morning, these
pallid valleys, horrid with noise of struggle and terror, the snorting
of a horse, the bellow of a bullock in pain, seem like some fantastic
dream of a new Inferno; but when at last the enormous sun has risen over
the mountains, and flooded the glens with furious heat, it is as though
you walked in some delirium, a shining world full of white fire dancing
in agony around you. You stumble along, sometimes waiting till a wagon
and twelve oxen have been beaten and thrust past you on the ascent,
sometimes driven half mad by the booming of the dynamite, here threading
an icy tunnel, there on the edge of a precipice, almost fainting in the
heat, listening madly to the sound of water far below. Then, as you
return through the sinister town of Torano with its sickening sights and
smells, you come into the pandemonium of the workshops, where nothing
has a being but the shriek of the rusty saws drenched with water, driven
by machinery, cutting the marble into uniform slabs to line urinals or
pave a closet. At last, in a sort of despair, overwhelmed with heat and
noise, you reach your inn, and though it be midday in July, you seize
your small baggage and set out where the difficult road leads out of
this spoiled valley to the olives and the sea.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was midday when, in spite of the sun, I set out up the long hill that
leads to La Foce and Massa from Carrara. It is a road that turns
continually on itself, climbing always, among the olive woods and
chestnuts, where the girls sing as they herd the goats, and the pleasant
murmur of the summer, the song of the cicale, the wind of the hills,
cleanse your heart of the horror of Carrara. Climbing thus at peace with
yourself for a long hour, you come suddenly to La Foce, a sort of ridge
or pass between the loftier hills, whence you may see the long-hidden
sea, and Montignoso, that old Lombard castle still fierce above the
olive woods, and Massa itself, Massa Ducale, a lofty precipitous city
crowned by an old fortress. Who may describe the beauty of the way under
the far-away peaks of marble, splendid in their rugged gesture, their
immortal perfection and indifference! And indeed, from La Foce all the
noise and cruelty of that life in the quarries at Carrara is forgotten.
As you begin to descend by the beautiful road that winds along the sides
of the hills, the burden of those immense quarries, echoing with cries
of distress inarticulate and pitiful, falls away from one. Here is Italy
herself, fair as a goddess, delicate as a woman, forlorn upon the
mountains. Everywhere in the quiet afternoon songs come to you from the
shady woods, from the hillsides and the streams. Something of the
simplicity and joy of a life we have only known in our hearts is
expressed in every fold of the mountains, olive clad and terraced with
walks and vines, where the husbandman labours till evening and the corn
is ripe or reaping, and the sound of the flute dances like a fountain in
the shade. And so, when at evening you enter the noble city of Massa,
among the women sitting at their doors sewing or knitting in the sunset,
while the children, whole crowds of them, play in the narrow streets,
their laughter echoing among the old houses as the sun dances in a
narrow valley, or you pass among the girls who walk together in a
nosegay, arm in arm, or the young men who lounge together in a crowd
against the houses watching them, there is joy in your heart, because
this is life, simple and frank and full of hope, without an afterthought
or a single hesitation of doubt or fear.

There is little to be seen at Massa that is not just the natural beauty
of the place, set like a flower among the woods, that climb up to the
marble peaks. Not without a certain interest you come upon the
Prefettura, which once was the summer castle of Elisa Baciocchi,
Napoleon's sister, who as a gift from him held Lucca, and was much
beloved, from 1805 to 1814. And joyful as the country is under that
impartial sun, before that wide and ancient sea, among her quiet woods
and broken shrines, it is not without a kind of hesitation and shame
almost that you learn that the great fortress which crowns the city is
now a prison in which are many half-witted unhappy folk, who in this
transitory life have left the common way. It is strange that in so many
lands the prison is so often in a place of the greatest beauty. At
Tarragona, far away over the sea looking towards Italy, the hospital of
those who have for one cause or another fallen by the way is set by the
sea-shore, almost at the feet of the waves, so that in a storm the
momentary foam from those restless, free waters must often be scattered
about the courtyard, where those who have injured us, and whom in our
wisdom we have deprived of the world, are permitted to walk. It is much
the same in Tangier, where the horrid gaol, always full of groans and
the torture of the bastinado, is in the dip of the Kasbah, where it
joins the European city with nothing really between it and the Atlantic.
In Massa these prisoners and captives can see the sea and the great
mountains, and must often hear the piping of those who wander freely in
the woods. Even in Italy, it seems, where the criminal is beginning to
be understood as a sick person, they have not yet contrived to banish
the older method of treatment: as who should say, you are ill and
fainting with anaemia, come let me bleed you.

It is at Massa that on your way south you come again into the highroad
from Genoa to Pisa, for while, having left it at Spezia, you found it
again at Sarzana, it was a by-road that led you to Carrara and again to
Massa Ducale. Now, though the way you seek be the highway of the
pilgrims, it is none the better as a road for that. For the wagons
bringing marble to the cities by the way have spoiled it altogether, so
that you find it ground with ruts six inches deep and smothered in dust;
therefore, if you come by carriage, and still more if you be _en
automobile_, it is necessary to go warily. On foot nothing matters but
the dust, and if you start early from Massa that will not annoy you, for
in the early morning, for some reason of the gods, the dust lies on the
highway undisturbed, while by ten o'clock the air is full of it. It is a
bad road then all the way to Pietrasanta, but most wonderful and lovely
nevertheless. For the most part the sea is hidden from you, for you are
in truth on the sea-shore, though far enough from the waves, a land of
fields and cucumbers coming between road and water. Swinging along in
the dawn, you soon pass that old castle of Montignoso, crumbling on its
high rock, built by the Lombard Agilulf to hold the road to Italy. Then
not without surprise you pass quite under an old Albergo which crosses
the way, where certainly of old the people of Massa took toll of the
Tuscans, and the Tuscans taxed all who came into their country. Then the
road winds through a gorge beside a river, and at last between delicious
woods of olives full of silver and golden shade most pleasant in the
heat, past Seravezza in the hills, you come to the little pink and white
town of Pietrasanta under the woods, at noon.

Pietrasanta is set at the foot of the Hills of Paradise, littered with
marble, planted with figs and oleanders, full of the sun. For hours you
may climb among the olives on the hills, terraced for vines, shimmering
in the heat; and resting there, watch the sleepy sea lost in a silver
mist, the mysterious blue hills, listening to the songs of the maidens
in the gardens. Thus watching the summer pass by, caught by her beauty,
lying on an old wall beautiful with lichen and the colours of many
autumns, suddenly you may be startled by the stealthy, unconcerned
approach of a great snake three feet long at least, winding along the
gully by the roadside. Half fascinated and altogether fearful, you watch
her pass by till she disappears bit by bit in an incredibly small
fissure in the vineyard wall, leaving you breathless. Or all day long
you will lie under the olives waiting for the coolness of evening,
listening to the sound of everlasting summer, the piping of a shepherd,
the little lovely song of a girl, the lament of the cicale. Then
returning to Pietrasanta, you will sit in the evening perhaps in the
Piazza there, quite surrounded by the old walls, with its mediaeval air,
its lovely Municipio and fine old Gothic churches. Here you may watch
all the city, the man and his wife and children, the young girls
laughing together, conscious of the shy admiration of the youth of the
place; and you will be struck by the beauty of these people, peasants
and workmen, their open, frank faces, their grace and strength, their
unconcerned delight in themselves, their air of distinction too, coming
to them from a long line of ancestors who have lived with the earth, the
mountains, and the sea.

Then in the early morning, perhaps, you will enter S. Martino and hear
the early Mass, where there are still so many worshippers, and then,
lingering after the service, you will admire the pulpit, carved really
by one of those youths whose frankness and grace surprised you in the
Piazza on the night before--Stagio Stagi, a native of this place, a fine
artist whose work continually meets you in Pietrasanta. Indeed, in the
choir of the church there are some candelabra by him, and an altar,
built, as it is said, out of two confessional boxes. In the Baptistery
close by are some bronzes, said to be the work of Donatello, and some
excellent sculptures by Stagio; while, as though to bear out the hidden
paganism, some dim memory of the old gods, that certainly haunts this
shrine, the font is an old Roman _tazza_, carved with Tritons and
Neptune among the waves; but over it now stands another supposed work of
Donatello, S. Giovanni Battista, reconciled, as we may hope, with those
whose worship he has usurped.

The façade of S. Martino is of the fourteenth century, as is that of S.
Agostino, its neighbour, where you may find another altar by Stagio.

Then it may be at evening you seek the sea-shore, that mysterious,
forlorn coast where the waves break almost with a caress. It was here,
or not far away, somewhere between this little wonderful city and
Viareggio, then certainly a mere village, that Shelley's body was
burned, as Trelawney records.[15] "The lovely and grand scenery that
surrounded us," he says, "so exactly harmonised with Shelley's genius,
that I could imagine his spirit soaring over us.... Not a human dwelling
was in sight.... I got a furnace made at Leghorn of iron bars and strong
sheet-iron supported on a stand, and laid in a stock of fuel and such
things as were said to be used by Shelley's much-loved Hellenes on their
funeral pyres.... At ten on the following morning, Captain S. and
myself, accompanied by several officers of the town, proceeded in our
boat down the small river which runs through Via Reggio (and forms its
harbour for coasting vessels) to the sea.[16] Keeping along the beach
towards Massa, we landed at about a mile from Via Reggio, at the foot of
the grave; the place was noted by three wand-like reeds stuck in the
sand in a parallel line from high to low-water mark. Doubting the
authenticity of such pyramids, we moved the sand in the line indicated,
but without success. I then got five or six men with spades to dig
transverse lines. In the meanwhile Lord Byron's carriage with Mr. Leigh
Hunt arrived, accompanied by a party of dragoons and the chief officers
of the town. In about an hour, and when almost in despair, I was
paralysed with the sharp and thrilling noise a spade made in coming in
direct contact with the skull. We now carefully removed the sand. This
grave was even nearer the sea than the other [Williams's], and although
not more than two feet deep, a quantity of the salt water oozed in.

"... We have built a much larger pile to-day, having previously been
deceived as to the immense quantity of wood necessary to consume a body
in the unconfined atmosphere." Mr. Shelley had been reading the poems of
"Lamia" and "Isabella" by Keats, as the volume was found turned back
open in his pocket; so sudden was the squall. The fragments being now
collected and placed in the furnace here fired, and the flames ascended
to the height of the lofty pines near us. We again gathered round, and
repeated, as far as we could remember, the ancient rites and ceremonies
used on similar occasions. Lord B. wished to have preserved the skull,
which was strikingly beautiful in its form. It was very small and very
thin, and fell to pieces on attempting to remove it.

"Notwithstanding the enormous fire, we had ample time e'er it was
consumed to contemplate the singular beauty and romantic wildness of the
scenery and objects around us. Via Reggio, the only seaport of the Duchy
of Lucca, built and encompassed by an almost boundless expanse of deep,
dark sand, is situated in the centre of a broad belt of firs, cedars,
pines, and evergreen oaks, which covers a considerable extent of
country, extending along the shore from Pisa to Massa. The bay of Spezia
was on our right, and Leghorn on our left, at almost equal distances,
with their headlands projecting far into the sea, and forming this whole
space of interval into a deep and dangerous gulf. A current setting in
strong, with a N.W. gale, a vessel embayed here was in a most perilous
situation; and consequently wrecks were numerous: the water is likewise
very shoal, and the breakers extend a long way from the shore. In the
centre of this bay my friends were wrecked, and their bodies tossed
about--Captain Williams seven, and Mr. Shelley nine days, e'er they were
found. Before us was a most extensive view of the Mediterranean, with
the isles of Gorgona, Caprera, Elba, and Corsica in sight. All around
us was a wilderness of barren soil with stunted trees, moulded into
grotesque and fantastic forms by the cutting S.W. gales. At short and
equal distances along the coast stood high, square, antique-looking
towers, with flagstaff's on the turrets, used to keep a look-out at sea
and enforce the quarantine laws. In the background was the long line of
the Italian Alps.

"... After the fire was kindled ... more wine was poured over Shelley's
dead body than he had consumed during his life. This, with the oil and
salt, made the yellow flames glisten and quiver.... The only portions
that were not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw and the
skull; but what surprised us all was that the heart remained entire. In
snatching this relic from the fiery furnace my hand was severely burnt;
and had anyone seen me do the act I should have been put in quarantine."
Shelley's ashes were taken to Rome, and buried in the English cemetery
there, a place he loved, that is perhaps the most beautiful of the
beautiful graveyards of Italy.

Of Viareggio itself there is little to be said. It is a town by the
seaside, full in summer of holiday-making Tuscans from Florence and the
cities round about. A pretty place enough, it possesses an unique
market-place covered in by ancient twisted plane trees, where the old
women chaffer with the cooks and contadine. But nothing, as it seems to
me, and certainly not so modern a place as Viareggio, will keep you long
from Pisa. Even on the dusty way from Pietrasanta, at every turn of the
road one has half expected to see the leaning tower and the Duomo. And
it is really with an indescribable impatience you spend the night in
Viareggio. Starting at dawn, still without a glimpse of Pisa, you enter
the Pineta before the sun, that lovely, green, cool forest full of
silver shadows, with every here and there a little farm for the pine
cones, about which they are heaped in great banks. Coming out of this
wood on the dusty road in the golden heat, between fields of cucumbers,
you meet market carts and contadini returning from the city. Then you
cross the Serchio in the early light, still and mysterious as a river
out of Malory. And at last, suddenly, like a mirage, the towers of Pisa
rise before you, faint and beautiful as in a dream. As you turn to look
behind you at the world you are leaving, you find that the mountains,
those marvellous Apuan Alps with their fragile peaks, have been lost in
the distance and the sky; and so, with half a regret, full of expectancy
and excitement nevertheless, you quicken your pace, and even in the heat
set out quickly for the white city before you,--Pisa, once lord of the
sea, the first great city of Tuscany.

FOOTNOTES:

[15] I no longer believe it is possible to be certain of the place. At
any rate, all the guide-books, Baedeker, Murray, and Hare, are wrong,
though not so far out as that gentleman who, having assured us that
Boccaccio was a "little priest," and that Petrarch, Poliziano, Lorenzo,
and Pulci were of no account as poets, remarks that Shelley's body was
found at Lerici, and that he was burned close by.

[16] See Carmichael, _The Old Road_, etc., pp. 183-202.




VI. PISA

I


To enter Pisa by the Porta Nuova, coming at once into the Piazza del
Duomo, is as though at midday, on the highway, one had turned aside into
a secret meadow full of a strange silence and dazzling light, where have
been abandoned among the wild flowers the statues of the gods. For the
Piazza is just that--a meadow scattered with daisies, among which, as
though forgotten, stand unbroken a Cathedral, a Baptistery, a Tower, and
a Cemetery, all of marble, separate and yet one in the consummate beauty
of their grouping. And as though weary of the silence and the light, the
tower has leaned towards the flowers, which may fade and pass away. So
amid the desolation of the Acropolis must the statues of the Parthenon
have looked from the hills and the sea, with something of this abandoned
splendour, this dazzling solitude, this mysterious calm silence,
satisfied and serene.

Wherever you may be in Pisa, you cannot escape from the mysterious
influence of those marvellous ghosts that haunt the verge of the city,
that corner apart where the wind is white on the grass, and the shadows
steal slowly through the day. The life of the world is far away on the
other side of the city; here is only beauty and peace.

If you come into the Piazza, as most travellers do, from the Lung' Arno,
as you turn into the Via S. Maria or out of the Borgo into the beautiful
Piazza dei Cavalieri, gradually as you pass on your way life hesitates
and at last deserts you. In the Via S. Maria, for instance, that winds
like a stream from the Duomo towards Arno, at first all is gay with the
memory and noise of the river, the dance of the sun and the wind. Then
you pass a church; some shadow seems to glide across the way, and it is
almost in dismay you glance up at the silent palaces, the colour of
pearl, barred and empty; and then looking down see the great paved way
where your footsteps make an echo; while there amid the great slabs of
granite the grass is peeping. It is generally out of such a shadowy
street as this that one comes into the dazzling Piazza del Duomo. But
indeed, all Pisa is like that. You pass from church to church, from one
deserted Piazza to another, and everywhere you disturb some shadow, some
silence is broken, some secret seems to be hid. The presence of those
marvellous abandoned things in the far corner of the city is felt in
every byway, in every alley, in every forgotten court. "Amid the
desolation of a city" this splendour is immortal, this glory is not
dead.

II

"Varie sono le opinioni degli Scrittori circa l'edificazione di Pisa,"
says Tronci in his _Annali Pisani_, published at Livorno in the
seventeenth century. "Various are the opinions of writers as to the
building of Pisa, but all agree that it was founded by the Greeks. Cato
in his _Fragment_, and Dionysius Halicarnassus in the first book of his
_History_, affirm that the founders were the Pisi Alfei Pelasgi, who had
for their captain the King Pelops, as Pliny says in his _Natural
History_ (lib. 5), and Solinus too, as though it were indubitable: who
does not know that Pisa was from Pelops?" Certainly Pisa is very old,
and whether or no King Pelops, as Pliny thought, founded the city, the
Romans thought her as old as Troy. In 225 B.C. she was an Etruscan city,
and the friend of Rome; in Strabo's day she was but two miles from
the sea; Caesar's time she became a Roman military station; while in 4
A.D. we read that the disturbances at the elections were so serious that
she was left without magistrates. That fact in itself seems to bring the
city before our eyes: it is so strangely characteristic of her later
history.

[Illustration: PISA

_Alinari_]

But in spite of her enormous antiquity, there are very few left of her
Etruscan and Roman days, the remains of some Roman Thermae, Bagni di
Nerone near the Porta Lucca being, indeed, all that we may claim, save
the urns and sarcophagi scattered in the Campo Santo, from the great
days of Rome. The glory of Pisa is the end of the Middle Age and the
early dawn of the Renaissance. There, amid all the hurly-burly and
terror of invasion and civil wars, she shines like a beacon beside the
sea, proud, brave, and full of hope, almost the only city not altogether
enslaved in a country in the grip of the barbarian, almost overwhelmed
by the Lombards. And indeed, she was one of the first cities of Italy to
fling off the Lombard yoke. Favoured by her position on the shores of
the Tyrrhenian Sea, yet not so near the coast as to invite piracy, she
waged incessant war on Greek and Saracen. Lombardy, heavy with conquest,
fearful for her prize, which was Italy, was compelled to encourage the
growth of the naval cities. It was on the sea that the future of Pisa
lay, like the glory of the sun that in its splendour and pride passes
away too soon.

Already in the ninth century we hear of her prowess at Salerno, while in
the tenth, having possessed herself of her own government under consuls,
she sent a fleet to help the Emperor Otho II in Sicily. Fighting without
respite or rest, continually victorious, never downhearted, she had
opened the weary story of the civil strife of Italy with a war against
Lucca, in the year 1004.[17] It was the first outburst of that hatred
in her heart which in the end was to destroy her for she died of a
poverty of love.

In 1005, still with her fleet engaged in Sicilian waters, the Arab
pirates fell upon her, and, forcing the harbour, sacked a whole quarter
of the city. For the time Pisa could do little against the foes of
Europe, but in 1016 she allied herself with that city which proved at
last to be her deadliest foe, Genoa the Proud, and the united fleets
swept down on Sardinia for vengeance. It was this victorious expedition
that aroused the hatred of the Pisans for Genoa, a jealousy that was
only extinguished when at last Pisa was crushed at Meloria.

Many were the attempts of the Arabs to regain Sardinia, but Pisa was not
to be deceived. Coasting along the African shore, her fleet took Bona
and threatened Carthage. Yet in 1050 the Arabs of Morocco and Spain
stole the island from her, only Cagliari holding out under the nobles
for the mother city. There was more than the loss of Sardinia at stake,
for with the victory of the Arabs the highway of the sea was no longer
secure, the existence of Pisa, and not of Pisa only, was threatened. So
we find Genoa once more standing beside Pisa in the fight of Europe. The
fleets again were combined, this time under the command of a Pisan, one
Gualduccio, a plebeian. He sailed for Cagliari, landed his men, and
engaged the enemy on the beach. The Arabs were led by the King Mogahid,
Rè Musetto, as the Italians called him. He was over eighty years old at
the time, and though still full of cunning valour, attacked by the
fleets in front and the garrison in the rear, his army was defeated and
put to flight. He himself, fleeing on horseback, was wounded in two
places, and falling was captured; and they took him in chains to Pisa,
where he died. Thus Sardinia once more fell into the hands of Europe,
and the island, divided in fiefs under the rule of Pisa,[18] was held
and governed by her.

But Pisa was not yet done with the Arab. She stood for Europe. In 1063
she fought at Palermo, returning laden with booty. It was then, after
much discussion in the Senate,[19] sending an embassy to the Pope and
another to "Rè Henrico di Germania," that she decided to employ this
spoil in building the Duomo, in the place where the old Church of S.
Reparata stood, and more anciently the Baths of Hadrian, the Emperor.
The temple, Tronci tells us,[20] was dedicated to the Magnificent Queen
of the Universe, Mary, ever Virgin, most worthy Mother of God, Advocate
of sinners. It was begun in 1064, and many years, as Tronci says, were
consumed in the building of it.[21] The pillars--and there are
many--were brought by the Pisans from Africa, from Egypt, from
Jerusalem, from Sardinia, and other far lands.

At this time Pisa was divided into four parts, called _Quartieri_. The
first was called _Ponte_, the ensign of which was a rosy Gonfalon; the
second, _di Mezzo_, which had a standard with seven yellow stripes on a
red field; the third, _Foriporta_, which had a white gate in a rosy
field; and the fourth, _Chinsica_ with a white cross in a red field.[22]

Nor was the Duomo the only building that the Pisans undertook about this
time. Eight years later, the Church of S. Pietro in Vincoli, called
to-day S. Pierino, was built on a spot where of old "there was a temple
of the Gentiles" dedicated to Apollo; that, when the Pisans received
the faith of Jesus Christ, they gave to St. Peter, the Prince of the
Apostles. This church appears to have been consecrated by the great
Archbishop Peter on 30th August 1119.

These two churches, and especially the Duomo, still perhaps the most
wonderful church in Italy, prove the greatness of the civilisation of
Pisa at this time. She was then a self-governed city, owing allegiance,
it is true, to the Marquisate of Tuscany, but with consuls of her own.
Since she was so warlike, the nobles naturally had a large part in her
affairs. In the Crusade of 1099 the Pisans were late, as the Genoese
never ceased to remind them,--to come late, in Genoa, being spoken of as
"_Come l'ajuto di Pisa_"; and, indeed, like the Genoese, the Pisans
thought as much of their own commercial advantage in these Holy Wars as
of the Tomb of Jesus. In 1100 they returned from Jerusalem, their
merchants having gained, _una loggia, una contrada, un fondaco e una
chiesa_ for their nation in Constantinople, with many other fiscal
benefits. Nor were they forgetful of their Duomo, for they came home
with much spoil, bringing the bodies of the Saints Nicodemus the Prince
of the Pharisees, Gamaliel the master of St. Paul, and Abibone, one of
the seventy-two disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ.[23]

Encouraged by their success, not long afterwards, they, in their
invincible confidence and force, decided to undertake another
enterprise. Urged thereto by their Archbishop Peter, they set out,
partly for glory, partly in the hope of spoil to free the thousands of
Christians held captive by the Arabs in the Balearic islands. The fleet
sailed on the 6th August 1114, the Feast of S. Sisto, the anniversary of
other victories. There were, it seems, some three hundred ships of
diverse strength; and every sort of person, old and young, took part in
this adventure. Going astray, they first landed in Catalonia and did
much damage; then, "acknowledging their unfortunate mistake," they found
the island, where, under Archbishop Peter and the Pope's gonfalone,
they were entirely successful. They released the captives, and, amid the
immense spoil, they brought away the son of the Moorish king, whom later
they baptized in Pisa and sent back to the Moors. The Pisan dead were,
however, very many. At first they thought to load a ship with the slain
and bring them home again; but this was not found possible. Sailing at
last for Marseilles, they buried them there in the Badia di S. Vittore,
later bringing the monks to Pisa.

Now, while the glory of Pisa shone thus upon the waters far away, the
Lucchesi thought to seize Pisa herself, deprived of her manhood. But the
Florentines, who at this time were friends with Pisa, since their
commerce depended upon the Porto Pisano, sent a company to guard the
city, encamping some two miles off; for since so much loot lay to hand,
to wit, Pisa herself, the Florentine captains feared lest they might not
be able to hold their men. And, indeed, one of their number entered the
city intent on the spoil, but was taken, and they judged him worthy only
of death. But the Pisans, not to be outdone in honour, refused to allow
him to be executed in their territory; then the Florentines bought a
plot of ground near the camp, and killed him there. When the fleet
returned and heard this, they determined to send Florence a present to
show their gratitude. Now, among the spoil were some bronze gates and
two rosy pillars of porphyry, very precious. Then they besought the
Florentines to choose one of these, the gates or the pillars, as a gift.
And Florence chose the pillars, which stand to-day beside the eastern
gate of the Baptistery in that city. But on the way to Florence they
encountered the Mugnone in flood, and were thrown down and broken there.
Hence the Florentines, that scornful and suspicious folk, swore that the
Pisans had cracked their gifts themselves with fire before sending them,
that Florence might not possess things so fair.

Other jealousies, too, arose out of the success of Pisa, though
indirectly. For the Genoese, never content that she should have the
overlordship of Sardinia, were still more disturbed when Pope Gelasius
II., that Pisan, gave Corsica to Pisa, so that about 1125[24] they made
war on her. The war lasted many years, till Innocent II, being Pope and
come to Pisa, made peace, giving the Genoese certain rights in Corsica.
About this time S. Bernard was in Pisa, where in 1134 Innocent II held a
General Council; not for long, however, for in the same year he set out
for Milan to reconcile that Church with Rome.

Her quarrel with Genoa was scarcely finished when Pisa found herself at
war with the Normans in Southern Italy, defending heroically the city of
Naples and utterly destroying Amalfi, the wonderful republic of the
South.[25] Certainly the might of Pisa was great; her supremacy was
unquestionable from Lerici to Piombino, but behind her hills Lucca was
on watch, not far away Florence her friend as yet, held the valley of
the Arno, while Genoa on the sea dogged her steps between the
continents. Thus Pisa stood in the middle of the twelfth century the
strongest and most warlike city in Tuscany, full of ambition and the
love of beauty and glory. For it was now in 1152 that she began to build
the Baptistery, and in 1174 the famous Campanile, a group of buildings
with the Duomo unrivalled in the world.

Meanwhile the Great Countess of Tuscany had died in 1115; more and more
Italy became divided against itself, and by the end of the century
Guelph and Ghibelline, commune and noble, were tearing her in pieces.
Tuscany, really little more than a group of communes devoted to trade,
with the great feudatories ever in the offing, without any real unity,
slowly became the stronghold of the Guelphs. Only Pisa,[26] glorying in
the strength of the sea and the splendour of war, was Ghibelline, with
Siena on her sunny hills. Now, having won Sardinia for herself, her
nobles there established were, as was their manner everywhere,
continually at feud. The Church, thinking to make Pisan sovereignty less
secure, supported the weaker. Already Innocent III had, following this
plan, called on the Pisans to withdraw their claim to the island. And it
was a Pisan noble, Visconti, who, marrying into one of the island
families related to Gregory IX, recognised the Papal suzerainty. Thus
this family in Pisa became Guelph. But the other nobles, among whom was
the Gherardesca family, threw their weight on the other side, and so
Pisa, who had ever leaned that way, became staunchly Ghibelline.[27]

The quarrel with Florence was certain sooner or later, for Florence was
growing in strength and riches; she would not for ever be content to let
Pisa hold her sea-gate, taking toll of all that passed in and out. It
was in 1222 that the first war broke out with the White Lily. Any excuse
was good enough; the bone of contention appears to have been a lap-dog
belonging to one of the Ambassadors[28]. Pisa was beaten. In 1259,
nevertheless, she turned on the Genoese and drove them down the seas.
But the death of Frederic in 1250 was the true end of the Ghibelline
cause in Italy.

What then did Pisa look like in these the days of her great power and
prosperity? She was a city, we may think, of narrow shadowy streets like
the Via delle Belle Torri, full of refuse and garbage too, for then, as
now in the remoter places, the household slops were simply hurled out of
the windows with a mere _guarda_! called from an upper window. And to
the horror of less fortunate cities, these streets were full of "Pagans,
Turks, Libyans, Parthians, and foul Chaldeans, with their incense,
pearls, and jewels." Yet though so good a Guelph as Donizo, the
biographer of the great Countess, can express his horror of these
"Gentiles," Genoa, too, must have been in much the same case; but then
Genoa was Guelph, and Pisa Ghibelline. Yet then, as to-day in that quiet
far corner of the city, in a meadow sprinkled with daisies, the great
white Duomo stood a silent witness to the splendour of the noblest
republic in Tuscany.

But her day was too soon over. In 1254, Florence and Lucca met and
defeated her. The Guelphs had won. In Pisa we find the government
reformed, elders appointed, a senate, a great council, and Podestà, a
Captain of the People. It seemed as though Pisa herself was about to
become Guelph, or at any rate to fling out her nobles. But in many a
distant colony the nobles ruled, undisturbed by the disaster at home.
And then, almost before she had set her house in order, the splendid
victory of Monteaperto threw the Guelphs into confusion, and the banners
of Pisa once more flew wide and far. But the fatal cause of the Empire
was doomed; Manfred fell at Benevento, and Corradino was defeated at
Tagliacozzo by Charles of Anjou, who, not content with victory, expelled
the Pisan merchants from his ports. There was left to her the sea.

Now Ugolino della Gherardesca, of the great family which had been
especially enraged by the conduct of Visconti, married his sister to one
of that family reigning at Gallura in Sardinia. This man, the judge of
Gallura, as he was called, had come to live in Pisa. The Pisans looked
with much suspicion on this alliance, and exiled first the Visconti and
later Ugolino himself, with all the other Guelphs. Ugolino went to
Lucca, and with her help in 1276 overcame his native city and forced her
to receive again the exiles. Then the merchandise of Florence passed
freely through her port, Lucca regained her fortresses, and Pisa herself
fell into the possession of Ugolino.

Nevertheless, without a thought of fear, looking ever seaward, she
awaited the Genoese attack, certain that it would come, since she was
divided within her gates. It was to be a fight to the death. During the
year 1282 the Genoese were driven back from the mouth of the Arno, the
Pisans were driven from Genoa, and scattered and spoiled by a storm.
These were but skirmishes; the fight was yet to come. In Genoa they
built a hundred and fifty ships of war; the Pisans, too, were straining
every nerve. Then came a running fight off Sardinia, in which the Pisans
had the worse of it, losing eight galleys and fifteen hundred men. Yet
they were not disheartened. They made Alberto Morosini, a Venetian,
their Podestà, and with him as Admirals were Count Ugolino della
Gherardesca and Andreotto Saracini. When the treasury was empty the
nobles gave their fortunes for the public cause. We hear of one family
giving eleven ships of war, others gave six, others less, as they were
able. At midsummer 1284 more than a hundred galleys sailed to Genoa, and
in scorn shot arrows of silver into the great harbour. But the Genoese
were not yet prepared. They were ready a few days later, however, when
the watchers by Arno "descried a hundred and seven sail" making for the
Porto. Then Pisa thrust forth her ships. With songs and with
thanksgiving the Archbishop Ubaldino, at the head of all the clergy of
the city, flung the Pisan standard out on the wind. It was night when
the fleet was lost to sight in the offing. In that night there came to
the Genoese thirty ships by way of reinforcement unknown to the Pisans.
These they hid behind the island of Meloria. At dawn the battle broke.
In many squadrons the ships flung themselves on one another, and for
long the victory hung in the balance. The Pisans had already grappled
for boarding, the battle was yet to win, when the Genoese reinforcements
sailed out from the island straight for the Pisan Admirals. The battle
was over. Flight--it was all that was left for Pisa. Ugolino himself was
said to have given the signal.

There fell that day five thousand Pisans, with eleven thousand captured,
and twenty-eight galleys lost to Genoa. There was no family in Pisa but
mourned its dead: for six months on every side nothing was heard but
lamentations and mourning. If you would see Pisa, it was said, you must
go to Genoa.

Pisa had lost the sea. In Tuscany she stood with Arezzo facing the
Guelph League. She elected Ugolino her Captain-General.[29] A man of the
greatest force and ability, he was ambitious rather for himself than for
Pisa. Having many Guelph friends, his business was to beat Genoa and the
Guelph League. He succeeded in part. He bribed Florence with certain
strongholds to leave the League, and he expelled the Ghibellines from
Pisa. Then he offered Genoa Castro in Sardinia as ransom for the Pisan
prisoners; but they sent word to the Council that they would not accept
their freedom at the price of the humiliation of their city. Such were
the Pisans. And, indeed, they threatened that if at such a price they
were set free, they would return only to punish those who had thought
such treason. Ugolino for his part cared not.[30] He proceeded to bribe
Lucca with other strongholds. In the city all was confusion. Ugolino was
turned out of the Dictatorship, he became Captain of the People. Not for
long, however, for soon he contrived to make himself tyrant again.

Now the Genoese, seeing they were like to get nothing out of their
prisoners by this, were anxious for a money ransom. But Ugolino, fearing
those brave men, broke the truce with Genoa, urging certain pirates of
Sardinia to attack the Genoese; and, in order to make sure of this,
while he himself went to his castle in the country, he arranged with
Ruggieri dei Ubaldini, the Archbishop, to expel the Guelphs, among them
his own nephew, from Pisa. The plot succeeded; but Pisa desired that the
Archbishop should for the future divide the power with Ugolino. To this
Ugolino would not agree, and in a rage he slew the nephew of the
Archbishop. Meanwhile, Ugolino's nephew, Nino Visconti, was plotting
with him to return. This came to the ears of Ruggieri, who called the
Ghibellines to arms, and at last succeeded in capturing Ugolino and his
family, after days of fighting. Well had Marco Lombardo, that "wise and
valiant man of affairs," told him, "The wrath of God is the only thing
lacking to you."

"Of a truth," says Villani, the old Florentine Chronicler,--"of a truth
the wrath of God soon came upon him, as it pleased God, because of his
treacheries and crimes; for when the Archbishop of Pisa and his
followers had succeeded in driving out Nino and his party, by the
counsel and treachery of Count Ugolino the forces of the Guelphs were
diminished; and then the Archbishop took counsel how to betray Count
Ugolino; and in a sudden uproar of the people he was attacked and
assaulted at the palace, the Archbishop giving the people to understand
that he had betrayed Pisa, and given up their fortresses to the
Florentines and the Lucchesi; and, being without any defence, the people
having turned against him, he surrendered himself prisoner; and at the
said assault one of his bastard sons and one of his grandsons were
slain, and Count Ugolino was taken and two of his sons and three
grandsons, his son's children, and they were put in prison; and his
household and followers, the Visconti and Ubizinghi, Guatini and all the
other Guelph houses, were driven out of Pisa. Thus was the traitor
betrayed by the traitor.... In the said year 1288, in the said month of
March ... the Pisans chose for their captain Count Guido of Montefeltro,
giving him wide jurisdiction and lordship; and he passed the boundaries
of Piedmont, within which he was confined by his terms of surrender to
the Church, and came to Pisa; for which thing he and his sons and family
and all the commonwealth of Pisa were excommunicated by the Church of
Rome, as rebels and enemies against Holy Church. And when the said Count
was come to Pisa ... the Pisans, which had put in prison Count Ugolino
and his two sons, and two sons of Count Guelpho his son ... in the tower
on the Piazza degli Anziani, caused the door of the said tower to be
locked and the keys thrown into Arno, and refused to the said prisoners
any food, which in a few days died there of hunger. And albeit first the
said Count demanded with cries to be shriven; yet did they not grant him
a friar or a priest to confess him. And when all the five dead bodies
were taken out of the tower, they were buried without honour; and
thenceforward the said prison was called the Tower of Hunger, and will
be always[31]."

Enough of Ugolino. Count Guido, that mystical, fierce soul from Urbino,
seeing danger everywhere, called the whole city to the army. Florence
had allied herself with Lucca and Genoa[32]. Count Guido's business was
to beat them. He did it[33]; so that by the Assumption of Our Lady in
1292 he had won back again nearly all the lost fortresses, and wrung
peace from the Guelph League. Nevertheless, Pisa was compelled to
sacrifice her captain, and to see Genoa established in Corsica and in
part of Sardinia; also she had to pay 160,000 lire to Genoa for the
Pisan captives, and in Elba to admit Genoese trade free of tax.

Some idea of the glory of Pisa even when she had suffered so much may be
had, perhaps, from Tronci's account of that Festival of the Assumption
of the Blessed Virgin as it was kept in August 1293, when the peace had
been signed.

The Anziani, Tronci tells us[34], "were used, for a month before the
Festa, to publish it in the following manner. Twenty horses covered all
with scarlet, went out of the city bearing twenty youths dressed in
fanciful and rich costumes. The first two carried two banners, one of
the Comunità, the other of the Popolo. Two others carried two lances of
silver washed with gold, on which were the Imperial eagles. Two others
bore on their fists two living eagles crowned with gold. The rest
followed in a company, dressed in rich liveries. There came after, the
trumpeters of the Comunità with the silver trumpets, and others with
fifes and wind instruments of divers loudness, and they proclaimed the
_Palii_ which were to be won on land and water.

"On land, the first prize was of red velvet lined with fur, with a great
eagle of silver. This he received who first reached the goal. To the
second was given a silken stuff of the value of thirty gold florins, to
the third in jest was offered a pair of geese and a bunch of garlic. On
the water the race was rowed in little galleys and brigantini. He who
came in first won a Bull covered with scarlet, and fifty _scudi_; the
second a piece of silken stuff with thirty gold florins, the third got
only geese and garlic.

"On the first day of August were placed on the towers of the city,
certainly some 16,000 in number, three banners on each of them; one with
the Imperial eagle, another of the Commune, and the third of the People.
In like manner, on the cupola, façade, and corners of the Duomo, on S.
Giovanni, on the Campo Santo and the Campanile, these banners flew not
only on the top, but at all the angles of the columns. The same were
seen on all the churches of the city, and on all the palaces, the
Palazzo Pubblico, the Palace of the Podestà, the Palazzo del Capitano
del Conservatore, the Corte del Consulato di Mare, on the palaces of the
Mercati and of the seven Arti. The Contado followed the example of the
city; and thus it continued all the month of August. And the whole
people of every sort made great rejoicing and feasting, to which
foreigners were particularly invited.

"At the first Vespers of the Festa, the Anziani went to the Duomo in
state: and before them walked the maidens dressed in new costumes; and
after came the trumpeters, and the Captain with his company, and all the
other lesser magistrates. When they were come to the Cathedral, the
Archbishop, vested _a Pontificale_, began solemn Vespers. This ended, a
youth mounted into the pulpit and chanted a prayer in praise of the
Assumption of the Most Glorious Virgin. Then Matins was sung; and that
finished, the procession made its way round about the church, and was
joined by all the Companies and the Regulars, carrying each man a candle
of wax of half a pound weight, alight in his hands. The Clergy followed
with the Canons and the Archbishop with lighted candles of greater
weight; and last came the Anziani, the Podestà, the Captain and other
Magistrates, the Representatives of the Arti, and all the People with
lights of wax in their hands. And the procession being over, all went to
see the illuminations, the bonfires, and the festa, through the city.

"On the morning of the Festa, the _ceri_ were placed on the _trabacche_,
that were more than sixty in number, carried, by boys dressed in
liveries, with much pomp. Immediately after followed the Anziani, the
Podestà, and the Captain of the People with all the other Magistrates
and Officials and the people, with the Company of Horse richly dressed
and with the Companies of Foot; and a little after came all the _arti_,
carrying each one his great _cero_ all painted, and accompanied by all
the wind instruments. It was a thing sweet to hear and beautiful to see.
The offering made, they went out to bring the silver girdle[35] borne
with great pomp on a _carretta_; and there assisted all the clergy in
procession with exquisite music both of voices and of instruments. The
usual ceremonies being over, they encircled the Cathedral, and hung the
girdle to the irons that were set round about. Yes, it was this girdle
of a great value and very beautiful that was spoken of through the whole
world, so that from many a city of Italy people came in haste to see it;
but to-day there is nothing of it left save a small particle[36]."

Misfortune certainly had not broken the spirit of Pisa. And so it is not
surprising that, though she dared scarcely fly her flag on the seas, on
land she thought to hold her own. No doubt this hope was strengthened by
the advent in 1312 of Henry VII of Luxembourg. With him on her side she
dreamed of the domination of Tuscany. But it was not to be. She found
money and arms in his cause and her own. She opened a new war with the
Guelph League; she suspended her own Government and made him lord of
Pisa. He remained with her two months, and then in 1313 he died at
Buonconvento. They buried him sadly in the Duomo. The two million
florins she had expended were lost for ever. Frederick of Sicily,
Henry's ally, though he came to Pisa, refused the proferred lordship, as
did Henry of Savoy; and at last Pisa placed herself under the Imperial
Vicar of Genoa, for that city also had been delivered by her nobles into
the hands of Henry VII.

Uguccione della Faggiuola, the Imperial Vicar of Genoa, remained, as
Imperial legate, Podestà, Captain of the People, and Elector, bringing
with him one thousand German horse. The rest of the army of Henry
returned over the Alps. Pisa thought herself on the verge of ruin; she
must make terms with her foes. This being done, there appeared to be no
further need for Uguccione, whose German troops were expensive, and
whose presence did but anger the Guelphs. Uguccione was a man of
enormous strength, brave, too, and resolute, swift to decide an issue,
wise in council, but a barbarian. What had he to do with peace. His
business was war, as he very soon let the Pisans know. Nor were they
slow to take him at his word. Pisa was never beaten. Uguccione marched
through the streets with the living eagles of the Empire borne before
him. Before long he had deprived the Guelphs of power, and was
practically tyrant of Pisa. Everything now seemed to depend on victory.
Lucca scarcely ten miles away, Guelph by tradition and hatred of Pisa,
was in an uproar. Uguccione saw his chance and took it; he flung himself
on the city and delivered it up to its own factions while the Pisans
sacked it. Nor did they spare the place. The spoil was enormous; among
the rest, a large sum belonging to the Pope fell into their hands.
Florence and her allies sprang to arms. Uguccione took up the challenge,
burnt the lands of Pistoja and San Miniato al Tedesco, ravaged the
vineyards of Volterra, seized the fortresses of Val di Nievole, and at
last besieged Montecatini.

It was now that the Ghibellines of Lucca with Castruccio Castracani
joined Uguccione. They met the army of Florence at Montecatini.
Machiavelli states that Uguccione fell ill, and had no part in the
battle, which was won by Castruccio. Villari, however, gives the glory
to Uguccione.

It might seem that Uguccione, whether ill or not on the day of battle,
was jealous, and perhaps afraid, of Castruccio. Certainly he plotted
against him, sending his son Nerli to Lucca with orders to trap
Castruccio and imprison him; which was done. Nerli, however, wanted
resolution to kill him; and his father hearing this, set out from Pisa
with four hundred horse to take the matter in hand. The Pisans, who were
by this time completely enslaved by Uguccione, seized the opportunity to
rise. Macchiavelli tells us "they cut his Deputies' throats, and slew
all his Family. Now, that he might be sure they were in earnest, they
chose the Conte de Gherardesca, and made him their Governor." When
Uguccione got to Lucca he found the city in an uproar, and the people
demanding the release of Castruccio. This he was compelled to allow.
With Castruccio at liberty, Lucca was too hot for him, and he fled into
Lombardy to the Lords of Scala, where no long time after, he died.

After the great victory of Montecatini, Gherardesca and Castruccio soon
came to terms with the Guelphs; and all that Pisa really seems to have
gained by the war was that she was compelled to build a hospital and
chapel for the repose of the souls of the dead at Montecatini. This
chapel, hidden away in the Casa dei Trovatelli at the top of Via S.
Maria in Pisa, became a glorious monument of the victory of Pisa over
Florence.

But the freedom of Pisa was gone for ever; others, lords and tyrants,
arose, Castruccio Castracani and the rest, yet she was still at bay. On
the 2nd October 1325 she again defeated Florence at Altopascio, and even
excluded her from the port, and, in 1341, when Florence had bought Lucca
from Mastino della Scala for 250,000 florins, she besieged it to prevent
the entry of the Florentine army then aided by Milan, Mantova, and
Padova, In 1342, the Florentines having failed to relieve Lucca, the
Pisans entered the city. The possession of Lucca seemed to put Pisa,
where centuries ago Luitprand had placed her, at the head of the
province of Tuscany. This view, which certainly she herself was not slow
to take, was confirmed when Volterra and Pistoja placed themselves under
her protection; yet, as ever, her greatest danger was the discord within
her walls. The Republic was weak, nearly a million and a half of florins
had been spent on the war, and many tyrants were her allies; moreover,
she had lent troops to Milan.[37] It was this moment of reaction after
so great an effort that Visconti d'Oleggio chose for a conspiracy
against Gherardesca the Captain-General. It is true the plot was
discovered, the traitors exiled, and Visconti banished; but the mischief
was done. When Lucchino Visconti heard of it in Milan, he imprisoned the
Pisan troops in that city and sent Visconti d'Oleggio back with two
thousand men to seize Pisa. Thus the war dragged on; and though these
Milanese were destroyed for the most part by malaria in the Maremma,
still Pisa had no rest. After Visconti came famine, and after the famine
the Black Death. Seventy in every hundred of the population died, Tronci
tells us,[38] while during the famine, bread, such as it was, had to be
distributed every day at the taverns. Then followed a revolution in the
city. Count Raniero of the Gherardesca house had succeeded to the
Captain-Generalship of Pisa as though it were his right by birth. This
brought him many enemies; and, indeed, the city was in uproar for some
years: for, while he was so young, Dino della Rocca acted for him. Among
the more powerful enemies of della Rocca was Andrea Gambacorti, whose
family was soon to enslave the city. Now the one party was called
_Bergolini_, for they had named Raniero Bergo for hate, and of these
Gambacorti was chief. The other party which was at this time in power,
as I have said, was named _Raspanti_, which is to say graspers, and of
them Dino della Rocca was head. In the midst of this disputing Raniero
died, and the Raspanti were accused of having murdered him, among others
by Gambacorti. Every sort of device to heal these wounds was resorted
to; marriages and oaths all alike failed. The city blazed with their
arson every night, till at last the people rose and expelling the
Raspanti, chose Andrea Gambacorti for captain. This happened in 1348.
Seven years later, Charles IV, on his way to Rome to be crowned, came to
the city. Now the Conte di Montescudaio was known to Charles, who years
before had ruled in Lucca; therefore the Raspanti, of when Montescudaio
was one, took heart, and at the moment when Charles was in the Duomo
receiving the homage of the city, they roused the people assembled in
the Piazza, shouting for the Emperor and Liberty; but Charles heeded
them not. Nevertheless Gambacorti, to save himself, thought fit to give
Charles the lordship of the city; but the people, angered at this,
demanded their liberty, so that the magistrates, fearing for peace,
reconciled the two factions, who then together demanded of Charles his
new lordship. And he gave it them with as good a grace as he could, for
his men were few. Then again he heard from Lucca. There, too, they
demanded liberty, and especially from the dominion of Pisa, and, it is
said, the Lucchesi in France gave him 20,000 florins for this. But Pisa
heard of it. When Charles sent his troops to occupy Lucca, the Raspanti
saw their opportunity and rose. They put themselves at the head of the
people, who slew one hundred and fifty of Charles's Germans, and held
Charles himself a prisoner in the Duomo, where he lodged since the
Palazzo Comunale had been fired. Montescudaio, however, secretly joined
Charles with his men; he burnt the houses of the Gambacorti and
dispersed the mob. Apparently Lucca was free. But Charles had reckoned
without the Pisan garrison in the subject city. They fired their
beacons, and Pisa saw the blaze. It was enough, their dominion was in
danger; there were no longer any factions; Raspanti and Bergolini alike
stood together for Pisa. They streamed out of the great Porta a Lucca to
the relief of their own people, and though six thousand armed peasants
opposed them, they won to Lucca and took it, the Pisani still holding
the gates. Then they fired the city, and when the flames closed in round
S. Michele the Lucchesi surrendered. Thus they served their enemies. But
Charles had his revenge. He seized the Gambacorti, and appointing a
judge, having given instructions to find them guilty, tried them and
beheaded seven of them in Piazza degli Anziani, in spite of the rage of
Pisa. Then, with a large amount of treasure, of which he had spoiled the
Pisans, he fled back with his barbarians to his Germany. And as soon as
he was gone the city took Montescudaio and sent him into exile[39], with
the remaining Gambacorti also. So Charles left Pisa more Ghibelline than
he found her.

It was at this time that Pisa really began to see perhaps her true
danger from Florence. Certainly she did everything to prick her into
war. But Florence was already victorious. Her answer was more disastrous
than any battle; she took her trade from the port of Pisa to the Sienese
port Talamone. Then Florence purchased Volterra, over the head of Pisa
as it were; and at last, careless whether it pleased the Pisans or no,
she permitted t

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