The Time Was In Genoa, It Seems, As The Time Is Now With Us, When A
Great Many People Did Not Know What To Do With Their Money.
There were
sumptuary laws which forbade their spending it, either they or their
wives or daughters, in dress; apparently
They could not even wear Genoa
velvet, which had to be sold abroad for the corruption of the outside
world; and this is said to be the reason why there were so many palaces
built in Genoa in the days of the republic. People who did not wish to
figure in that hall of fame put their surplus into the immense and often
ugly edifices which we still see ministering to their pride in the wide
and narrow streets of the city. Now and then a devout family built or
rebuilt a church and gave it to the public; but by far the greater
number put up palaces, where, after the house-warming, they dwelt in a
cold and economical seclusion. Some of their palaces are now devoted to
public uses; they are galleries of pictures and statues most worthy to
be seen, or they are municipal offices, or museums, or schools of art or
science; but part are still in the keeping of the families that
contributed them to the splendor of their city. The streets in which
they stand are loud with transit and traffic, but the palaces hold aloof
from the turmoil and lift their lofty heads to the level of the gardens
behind them. Huge, heavy they are, according to the local ideal, and
always wanting the delicacy of Venetian architecture, where something in
the native genius tempered to gentleness the cold severity of Palladio,
and where Sansovino knew how to bridge the gulf between the Gothic and
the Renascent art that would have been Greek but halted at being Roman.
The grandeur of those streets of palaces in Genoa cannot be denied, but
perhaps, if the visitor quite consulted his preference or indulged his
humor, he would wander rather through the arcades of the busy port, up
the chasmal alleys of little shops into the tiny piazzas, no bigger than
a good-sized room, opening before some ancient church and packed with
busy, noisy people. The perspective there is often like the perspective
in old Naples, but the uproar in Genoa does not break in music as it
does in Naples, and the chill lingering in the sunless depths of those
chasms is the cold of a winter that begins earlier and a spring that
loiters later than the genial seasons of the South.
X
EDEN AFTER THE FALL
A few years ago an Englishman who had lived our neighbor in the same
villa at San Remo, came and said that he was going away because it was
so dull at San Remo. He was going with his wife to Monte Carlo, because
you could find amusement every day in the week at the tables of the
different games of chance, and Sundays there was a very nice little
English church. He did not seem to think there was anything out of the
way in his grouping of these advantages, but he did not strongly urge
them upon us, and we restricted ourselves in turn to our tacit
reflections on the indifference of the English to a point of morals on
which the American conscience is apt to suffer more or less anguish if
it offends. So far as I know they do not think it wrong to take money
won at any game; but possibly their depravity in this matter rather
comforted us than offended. At any rate, I am sure of the superiority of
our own morals in visiting Monte Carlo after we left Genoa. If we did
not look forward with our Englishman's complacency to the nice little
church there, we certainly did not mean to risk our money at the tables
of Roulette, nor yet at the tables of Trente et Quarante, in the Casino.
What we really wished to do was to look on in the spiritual security of
saints while the sinners of both sexes lost and gained to the equal hurt
of their souls. We perhaps expected to hear the report of a pistol in
the gardens of the Casino, if we did not actually see the ruined gambler
falling among the flowers, or if not so much as this, we thought we
might witness his dramatic despair as the croupier drew in the last
remnant of his fortune and mechanically invited the other Messieurs and
Mesdames to make their game; secretly, we might even have been willing
to see something hysterical on the part of the Mesdames if fate frowned
upon them, or something scandalously exuberant if it smiled. If our
motives were not the worst, they were, at any rate, not the best; I
suppose they were the usual human motives, and I am afraid they were
mixed.
We found it rather long from Genoa to Monte Carlo, but this was not so
much because of the distance as because of the delays of our train,
which, having started late, grew reckless on the way, and before we
reached the Italian frontier at Ventimiglia, had lost all shame and
failed to connect there with the French train for the rest of our
journey. So, instead of having barely time to affirm our innocence of
tobacco, spirits, or perfumes to the customs officers, and to wash down
a sandwich with a cup of coffee at the restaurant, we had an hour and
forty minutes at Ventimiglia, which I partly spent in vain attempts to
buy the poverty of the inspector so far as to prevail with him not to
delay the examination of our baggage, but to proceed to it at once, in
order that we might have it all off our minds, and devote our long
leisure to the inquiry by what steps the ancient Li-gurian tribe of the
Intemelii lost their name in its actual corruption of Ventimiglia.
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