the other evening about sunset, and couldn't help pacing up and
down for a little time, drowsily taking in the aspect of the place:
which is repeated hereabouts in all directions.
I loitered to and fro, under a colonnade, forming two sides of a
weedy, grass-grown court-yard, whereof the house formed a third
side, and a low terrace-walk, overlooking the garden and the
neighbouring hills, the fourth. I don't believe there was an
uncracked stone in the whole pavement. In the centre was a
melancholy statue, so piebald in its decay, that it looked exactly
as if it had been covered with sticking-plaster, and afterwards
powdered. The stables, coach-houses, offices, were all empty, all
ruinous, all utterly deserted.
Doors had lost their hinges, and were holding on by their latches;
windows were broken, painted plaster had peeled off, and was lying
about in clods; fowls and cats had so taken possession of the outbuildings,
that I couldn't help thinking of the fairy tales, and
eyeing them with suspicion, as transformed retainers, waiting to be
changed back again. One old Tom in particular: a scraggy brute,
with a hungry green eye (a poor relation, in reality, I am inclined
to think): came prowling round and round me, as if he half
believed, for the moment, that I might be the hero come to marry
the lady, and set all to-rights; but discovering his mistake, he
suddenly gave a grim snarl, and walked away with such a tremendous
tail, that he couldn't get into the little hole where he lived, but
was obliged to wait outside, until his indignation and his tail had
gone down together.
In a sort of summer-house, or whatever it may be, in this
colonnade, some Englishmen had been living, like grubs in a nut;
but the Jesuits had given them notice to go, and they had gone, and
THAT was shut up too. The house: a wandering, echoing, thundering
barrack of a place, with the lower windows barred up, as usual, was
wide open at the door: and I have no doubt I might have gone in,
and gone to bed, and gone dead, and nobody a bit the wiser. Only
one suite of rooms on an upper floor was tenanted; and from one of
these, the voice of a young-lady vocalist, practising bravura
lustily, came flaunting out upon the silent evening.
I went down into the garden, intended to be prim and quaint, with
avenues, and terraces, and orange-trees, and statues, and water in
stone basins; and everything was green, gaunt, weedy, straggling,
under grown or over grown, mildewy, damp, redolent of all sorts of
slabby, clammy, creeping, and uncomfortable life. There was
nothing bright in the whole scene but a firefly - one solitary
firefly - showing against the dark bushes like the last little
speck of the departed Glory of the house; and even it went flitting
up and down at sudden angles, and leaving a place with a jerk, and
describing an irregular circle, and returning to the same place
with a twitch that startled one: as if it were looking for the
rest of the Glory, and wondering (Heaven knows it might!) what had
become of it.
In the course of two months, the flitting shapes and shadows of my
dismal entering reverie gradually resolved themselves into familiar
forms and substances; and I already began to think that when the
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time should come, a year hence, for closing the long holiday and
turning back to England, I might part from Genoa with anything but
a glad heart.
It is a place that 'grows upon you' every day. There seems to be
always something to find out in it. There are the most
extraordinary alleys and by-ways to walk about in. You can lose
your way (what a comfort that is, when you are idle!) twenty times
a day, if you like; and turn up again, under the most unexpected
and surprising difficulties. It abounds in the strangest
contrasts; things that are picturesque, ugly, mean, magnificent,
delightful, and offensive, break upon the view at every turn.
They who would know how beautiful the country immediately
surrounding Genoa is, should climb (in clear weather) to the top of
Monte Faccio, or, at least, ride round the city walls: a feat more
easily performed. No prospect can be more diversified and lovely
than the changing views of the harbour, and the valleys of the two
rivers, the Polcevera and the Bizagno, from the heights along which
the strongly fortified walls are carried, like the great wall of
China in little. In not the least picturesque part of this ride,
there is a fair specimen of a real Genoese tavern, where the
visitor may derive good entertainment from real Genoese dishes,
such as Tagliarini; Ravioli; German sausages, strong of garlic,
sliced and eaten with fresh green figs; cocks' combs and sheepkidneys,
chopped up with mutton chops and liver; small pieces of
some unknown part of a calf, twisted into small shreds, fried, and
served up in a great dish like white-bait; and other curiosities of
that kind. They often get wine at these suburban Trattorie, from
France and Spain and Portugal, which is brought over by small
captains in little trading-vessels. They buy it at so much a
bottle, without asking what it is, or caring to remember if anybody
tells them, and usually divide it into two heaps; of which they
label one Champagne, and the other Madeira. The various opposite
flavours, qualities, countries, ages, and vintages that are
comprised under these two general heads is quite extraordinary.
The most limited range is probably from cool Gruel up to old
Marsala, and down again to apple Tea.
The great majority of the streets are as narrow as any thoroughfare
can well be, where people (even Italian people) are supposed to
live and walk about; being mere lanes, with here and there a kind
of well, or breathing-place. The houses are immensely high,
painted in all sorts of colours, and are in every stage and state
of damage, dirt, and lack of repair. They are commonly let off in
floors, or flats, like the houses in the old town of Edinburgh, or
many houses in Paris. There are few street doors; the entrance
halls are, for the most part, looked upon as public property; and
any moderately enterprising scavenger might make a fine fortune by
now and then clearing them out. As it is impossible for coaches to
penetrate into these streets, there are sedan chairs, gilded and
otherwise, for hire in divers places. A great many private chairs
are also kept among the nobility and gentry; and at night these are
trotted to and fro in all directions, preceded by bearers of great
lanthorns, made of linen stretched upon a frame. The sedans and
lanthorns are the legitimate successors of the long strings of
patient and much-abused mules, that go jingling their little bells
through these confined streets all day long. They follow them, as
regularly as the stars the sun.
When shall I forget the Streets of Palaces: the Strada Nuova and
the Strada Balbi! or how th
e former looked one summer day, when I
first saw it underneath the brightest and most intensely blue of
summer skies: which its narrow perspective of immense mansions,
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reduced to a tapering and most precious strip of brightness,
looking down upon the heavy shade below! A brightness not too
common, even in July and August, to be well esteemed: for, if the
Truth must out, there were not eight blue skies in as many
midsummer weeks, saving, sometimes, early in the morning; when,
looking out to sea, the water and the firmament were one world of
deep and brilliant blue. At other times, there were clouds and
haze enough to make an Englishman grumble in his own climate.
The endless details of these rich Palaces: the walls of some of
them, within, alive with masterpieces by Vandyke! The great,
heavy, stone balconies, one above another, and tier over tier:
with here and there, one larger than the rest, towering high up - a
huge marble platform; the doorless vestibules, massively barred
lower windows, immense public staircases, thick marble pillars,
strong dungeon-like arches, and dreary, dreaming, echoing vaulted
chambers: among which the eye wanders again, and again, and again,
as every palace is succeeded by another - the terrace gardens
between house and house, with green arches of the vine, and groves
of orange-trees, and blushing oleander in full bloom, twenty,
thirty, forty feet above the street - the painted halls,
mouldering, and blotting, and rotting in the damp corners, and
still shining out in beautiful colours and voluptuous designs,
where the walls are dry - the faded figures on the outsides of the
houses, holding wreaths, and crowns, and flying upward, and
downward, and standing in niches, and here and there looking
fainter and more feeble than elsewhere, by contrast with some fresh
little Cupids, who on a more recently decorated portion of the
front, are stretching out what seems to be the semblance of a
blanket, but is, indeed, a sun-dial - the steep, steep, up-hill
streets of small palaces (but very large palaces for all that),
with marble terraces looking down into close by-ways - the
magnificent and innumerable Churches; and the rapid passage from a
street of stately edifices, into a maze of the vilest squalor,
steaming with unwholesome stenches, and swarming with half-naked
children and whole worlds of dirty people - make up, altogether,
such a scene of wonder: so lively, and yet so dead: so noisy, and
yet so quiet: so obtrusive, and yet so shy and lowering: so wide
awake, and yet so fast asleep: that it is a sort of intoxication
to a stranger to walk on, and on, and on, and look about him. A
bewildering phantasmagoria, with all the inconsistency of a dream,
and all the pain and all the pleasure of an extravagant reality!
The different uses to which some of these Palaces are applied, all
at once, is characteristic. For instance, the English Banker (my
excellent and hospitable friend) has his office in a good-sized
Palazzo in the Strada Nuova. In the hall (every inch of which is
elaborately painted, but which is as dirty as a police-station in
London), a hook-nosed Saracen's Head with an immense quantity of
black hair (there is a man attached to it) sells walking-sticks.
On the other side of the doorway, a lady with a showy handkerchief
for head-dress (wife to the Saracen's Head, I believe) sells
articles of her own knitting; and sometimes flowers. A little
further in, two or three blind men occasionally beg. Sometimes,
they are visited by a man without legs, on a little go-cart, but
who has such a fresh-coloured, lively face, and such a respectable,
well-conditioned body, that he looks as if he had sunk into the
ground up to his middle, or had come, but partially, up a flight of
cellar-steps to speak to somebody. A little further in, a few men,
perhaps, lie asleep in the middle of the day; or they may be
chairmen waiting for their absent freight. If so, they have
brought their chairs in with them, and there THEY stand also. On
the left of the hall is a little room: a hatter's shop. On the
first floor, is the English bank. On the first floor also, is a
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whole house, and a good large residence too. Heaven knows what
there may be above that; but when you are there, you have only just
begun to go up-stairs. And yet, coming down-stairs again, thinking
of this; and passing out at a great crazy door in the back of the
hall, instead of turning the other way, to get into the street
again; it bangs behind you, making the dismallest and most lonesome
echoes, and you stand in a yard (the yard of the same house) which
seems to have been unvisited by human foot, for a hundred years.
Not a sound disturbs its repose. Not a head, thrust out of any of
the grim, dark, jealous windows, within sight, makes the weeds in
the cracked pavement faint of heart, by suggesting the possibility
of there being hands to grub them up. Opposite to you, is a giant
figure carved in stone, reclining, with an urn, upon a lofty piece
of artificial rockwork; and out of the urn, dangles the fag end of
a leaden pipe, which, once upon a time, poured a small torrent down
the rocks. But the eye-sockets of the giant are not drier than
nearly upside down, a final tilt; and after crying, like a
sepulchral child, 'All gone!' to have lapsed into a stony silence.
In the streets of shops, the houses are much smaller, but of great
size notwithstanding, and extremely high. They are very dirty:
quite undrained, if my nose be at all reliable: and emit a
peculiar fragrance, like the smell of very bad cheese, kept in very
hot blankets. Notwithstanding the height of the houses, there
would seem to have been a lack of room in the City, for new houses
are thrust in everywhere. Wherever it has been possible to cram a
tumble-down tenement into a crack or corner, in it has gone. If
there be a nook or angle in the wall of a church, or a crevice in
any other dead wall, of any sort, there you are sure to find some
kind of habitation: looking as if it had grown there, like a
fungus. Against the Government House, against the old Senate
House, round about any large building, little shops stick so close,
like parasite vermin to the great carcase. And for all this, look
where you may: up steps, down steps, anywhere, everywhere: there
are irregular houses, receding, starting forward, tumbling down,
leaning against their neighbours, crippling themselves or their
friends by some means or other, until one, more irregular than the
rest, chokes up the way, and you can't see any further.
One of the rottenest-looking parts of the town, I think, is down by
the landing-wharf: though it may be, that its being associated
with a great deal of rottenness on the evening of our arrival, has
stamped it dee
per in my mind. Here, again, the houses are very
high, and are of an infinite variety of deformed shapes, and have
(as most of the houses have) something hanging out of a great many
windows, and wafting its frowsy fragrance on the breeze.
Sometimes, it is a curtain; sometimes, it is a carpet; sometimes,
it is a bed; sometimes, a whole line-full of clothes; but there is
almost always something. Before the basement of these houses, is
an arcade over the pavement: very massive, dark, and low, like an
old crypt. The stone, or plaster, of which it is made, has turned
quite black; and against every one of these black piles, all sorts
of filth and garbage seem to accumulate spontaneously. Beneath
some of the arches, the sellers of macaroni and polenta establish
their stalls, which are by no means inviting. The offal of a fishmarket,
near at hand - that is to say, of a back lane, where people
sit upon the ground and on various old bulk-heads and sheds, and
sell fish when they have any to dispose of - and of a vegetable
market, constructed on the same principle - are contributed to the
decoration of this quarter; and as all the mercantile business is
transacted here, and it is crowded all day, it has a very decided
flavour about it. The Porto Franco, or Free Port (where goods
brought in from foreign countries pay no duty until they are sold
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and taken out, as in a bonded warehouse in England), is down here
also; and two portentous officials, in cocked hats, stand at the
gate to search you if they choose, and to keep out Monks and
Ladies. For, Sanctity as well as Beauty has been known to yield to
the temptation of smuggling, and in the same way: that is to say,
by concealing the smuggled property beneath the loose folds of its
dress. So Sanctity and Beauty may, by no means, enter.
The streets of Genoa would be all the better for the importation of
a few Priests of prepossessing appearance. Every fourth or fifth
man in the streets is a Priest or a Monk; and there is pretty sure
to be at least one itinerant ecclesiastic inside or outside every
hackney carriage on the neighbouring roads. I have no knowledge,
elsewhere, of more repulsive countenances than are to be found
among these gentry. If Nature's handwriting be at all legible,
greater varieties of sloth, deceit, and intellectual torpor, could