Roman Holidays And Others. William Dean Howells
it was pleasant to find a many-centuried mother of commerce like Genoa of the dignified gray which she wears to the eye, whether it looks down on her from the heights above her port or up at her from the thickly masted and thickly funnelled waters of the harbor. Most European towns have red tiled roofs, which one gets rather tired of putting into one's word paintings, but the roofs of Genoa are gray tiled, and gray are her serried house walls, and gray her many churches and bell-towers. The sober tone gratifies your eye immensely, and the fact that your eye has noted it and not attributed the conventional coloring of southern Europe to the city is a flattery to your pride which you will not refuse. It is not a setting for opera like Naples; there is something businesslike in it which agrees with your American mood if you are true to America, and recalls you to duty if you are not.
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. It is frescoed round with classically imagined portraits of the different Dorias, and above all the portrait of that great hero of the republic. I do not know that this portrait particularly impresses you; if you have been here before you will be reserving yourself for the portrait which the custodian will lead you to see in the ultimate chamber of the rather rude old palace, where it is like a living presence.
It is the picture of a very old man in a flat cap, sitting sunken forward in his deep chair, with his thin, long hands folded one on the other, and looking wearily at you out of his faded eyes, in which dwell the memories of action in every sort and counsel in every kind. Victor in battles by land and sea, statesman and leader and sage, he looks it all in that wonderful effigy, which shuns no effect of his more than ninety years, but confesses his great age as a part of his greatness with a pathetic reality. The white beard, with “each particular hair” defined, falling almost to the pale, lean hands, is an essential part of the presentment, which is full of such scrupulous detail as the eye would unconsciously take note of in confronting the man himself and afterward supply in the remembrance of the whole. As if it were a part of his personality, on a table facing him, covered with maps and papers, sits the mighty admiral's cat, which, with true feline im-passiveness, ignores the spectator and gives its sole regard to the admiral. There are possibly better portraits in the world than this, which was once by Sebastiano del Piombo and is now by Titian; but I remember none which has moved me more.
We tried in vain for a photograph of it, and then after a brief glance at the riches of the Church of the Annunziata, where we were followed around the interior by a sacristan who desired us to note that the pillars were “All inlady, all inlady” with different marbles, and, after a chilly moment in San Lorenzo, which the worshippers and the masons were sharing between them in the prayers and repairs always going on in cathedrals, we drove for luncheon to the hotel where we had sojourned in great comfort three years before. Genoa has rather a bad name for its hotels, but we had found this one charming, perhaps because when we had objected to going five flights up the landlord had led us yet a floor higher, that we might walk into the garden. It is so in much of Genoa, where the precipitous nature of the site makes this vivid contrast between the levels of the front door and the back gate. Many of the streets have been widened since Heine saw the gossiping neighbors touching knees across them, but nothing less than an earthquake could change the temperamental topography of the place. It has its advantages; when there is a ring at the door the housemaid, instead of panting up from the kitchen to answer it, has merely to fall down five pairs of stairs. It cannot be denied, either, that the steep incline gives a charm to the streets which overcome it with sidewalks and driveways and trolley-tracks. Such a street as the Via Garibaldi (there is a Via Garibaldi in every Italian city, town, and village, and ought to be a dozen), compactly built, but giving here and there over the houses' shoulders glimpses of the gardens lurking behind them, is of a dignity full of the energy which a flat thoroughfare never displays or imparts. Without the inspiration lent us by the street, I am sure we should never have got to the top of it with our cab when we went to the Campo Santo; and, as it was, we had to help our horses upward by involuntarily straining forward from our places. But the Campo Santo was richly worth the effort, for to visit that famous cemetery is to enjoy an experience of which it is the unique opportunity.
I wish to celebrate it because it seems to me one of the frankest expressions of national taste and nature, and I do like simplicity—in others. The modern Italians are the most literal of the realists in all the arts, and, as I had striven for reality in my own poor way, I was perhaps the more curious to see its effects in sculpture which I had heard of so much. I will own that they went far beyond my expectation and possibly my wishes; but it is not to be supposed that it is only inferior artists who have abandoned themselves to the excesses of fidelity so abundant in the Campo Santo. There are, of course, enough poor falterings of allegory and tradition in the marble walls and floors of this vast residence of the dead (as it gives you the cheerful impression of being), but the characteristic note of the place is a realism braving it out in every extreme of actuality. Possibly the fact is most striking in that death-bed scene where the family, life-size and unsparingly portraitured, and, as it were, photographed in marble, are gathered in the room of the dying mother. She lies on a bedstead which bears every mark of being one of a standard chamber-set in the early eighteen-seventies, and about her stand her husband and her sons and daughters and their wives and husbands, in the fashions of that day. I recall a brother, in a cutaway coat, and a daughter, in a tie-back, embraced in their grief and turning their faces away from their mother toward the spectator; and doubtless there were others whom to describe in their dress would render as grotesque. It is enough to say that the artist, of a name well known in Italy and of uncommon gift, has been as true to the moment in their costume as to the eternal humanity in their faces. He has done what the sculptor or painter of the great periods of art used to do with their historical and scriptural people—he has put them in the dress of his own time and place; and it is impossible to deny him a convincing logic. No sophistry or convention of drapery in the scene could have