I Had Not Been In Genoa Since 1864 Except For A Few Days In 1905, And I
Saw Changes Which I Will Mostly Not Specify.
Already at the earlier date
the railway had cut through the beautiful and reverend Doria garden and
left the
Old palace some scanty grounds on the sea-level, where commerce
noisily encompassed it with trains and tracks and lines of freight-cars.
But there had remained up to my last visit that grot on the gardened
hill-slope whence a colossal marble Hercules helplessly overlooked the
offence offered by the railroad; and now suddenly here was the lofty
wall of some new edifice stretching across in front of the Hercules and
wholly shutting him from view; for all I know it may have made him part
of its structure.
Let this stand for a type of the change which had passed upon Genoa and
has passed or is passing upon all Italy. The trouble is that Italy is
full of very living Italians, the quickest-witted people in the world,
who are alert to seize every chance for bettering themselves financially
as they have bettered themselves politically. For my part, I always
wonder they do not still rule the world when I see how intellectually
fit they are to do it, how beyond any other race they seem still
equipped for their ancient primacy. Possibly it is their ancient primacy
which hangs about their necks and loads them down. It is better to have
too little past, as we have, than too much, as they have. But if
antiquity hampers them, they are tenderer of its vast mass than we are
of our little fragments of it; tenderer than any other people, except
perhaps the English, have shown themselves; but when the time comes that
the past stands distinctly in the way of the future, down goes the past,
even in Italy. I am not saying that I do not see why that railroad could
not have tunnelled under the Doria garden rather than cut through it;
and I am waiting for that new building to justify its behavior toward
that poor old Hercules; but in the mean time I hold that Italy is for
the Italians who now live in it, and have to get that better living out
of it which we others all want our countries to yield us; and that it is
not merely a playground for tourists who wish to sentimentalize it, or
study it, or sketch it, or make copy of it, as I am doing now.
All the same I will not deny that I enjoyed more than any of the
improvements which I noted in Genoa that bit of the old Doria
palace-grounds which progress has left it. The gray edifice looks out on
the neighboring traffic across the leanness of a lovely old garden, with
statues and stone seats, and in the midst a softly soliloquizing
fountain, painted green with moss and mould. When you enter the palace,
as you do in response to a custodian who soon comes with a key and asks
if you would like to see it, you find yourself, one flight up, in a long
glazed gallery, fronting on the garden, which is so warm with the sun
that you wish to spend the rest of your stay in Genoa there.
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