When She Would Govern Herself, She First Made
Her Elective Chief Magistrate Doge For Life, And Then For Two Years;
Under both forms she submitted and rebelled at will from 1359 till 1802,
when, after having accepted the French notion
Of freedom from Bonaparte,
she enjoyed a lion's share of his vicissitudes. For a hundred years
before that the warring powers had fought over her in their various
quarrels about successions, and she ought to have been well inured to
suffering when, in 1800, the English and the Austrians besieged her
French garrison, and twenty thousand of her people starved in a cause
not their own. The English restored the Doges, and the Republic of Genoa
fell at last nineteen years after the Republic of Venice and three
hundred years after the Republic of Florence. She was given to Piedmont
in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna, and she has formed part of Italy ever
since the unification. I believe that now she is of rather radical
opinions in politics, though the bookseller who found on his shelves a
last copy of the interesting sketch of Genoese history which I have
profited by so little, said that the Genoese had been disappointed in
the Socialists, lately in power, and were now voting Clerical by a large
majority.
The fact may have been colored by the book-seller's feelings. If the
Clericals are in superior force, the clerics are not: nowhere in Italy
did I see so few priests. All other orders of people throng the narrow,
noisy, lofty streets, where the crash of feet and hoofs and wheels beats
to the topmost stories of the palaces towering overhead in their stony
grandiosity. Everywhere in the structures dating after the Gothic period
there is want of sensibility; the art of the Renaissance was not moulded
here in the moods of a refined and effeminate patriciate, such as in
Venice tempered it to beauty; but it renders in marble the prepotence of
a commercialized nobility, and makes good in that form the right of the
city to be called Genoa the Proud. Perhaps she would not wish to be
called proud because of these palaces alone. It is imaginable that she
would like the stranger to remember the magnificence with which she
rewarded the patriotism of her greatest citizen after Columbus and
Mazzini: that mighty admiral, Andrea Doria, who freed this country first
from the rule of Charles V. and then from the rule of Francis I.; who
swept the Barbary corsairs from the seas; who beat the Turks in battles
on ship and on shore; who took Corsica from the French when he was
eighty-eight years old; who suffered from civil faction; who outlived
exile as he had outlived war, and who died at the age of ninety-four,
after he had refused the sovereignty of the country he had served so
long; who was the Washington of his day, and was equally statesman and
soldier, and, above all, patriot.
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