Genoa to Spezia

 

Edward Hutton regarded the road from Genoa to Spezia as one of the most beautiful in the world. Below are excerpts from his description of the road that he seems to have traversed on foot and horseback.

 

It was already summer when, one morning, soon after sunrise, I set out from Genoa for Tuscany. The road to Spezia along the Riviera di Levante, among the orange groves and the olives, between the mountains and the sea, is one of the most beautiful in Europe. Forgotten, or for the most part unused, by the traveller who is the slave of the railway, it has not the reputation of its only rivals, the Corniche road from Nice to Mentone, the lovely highway from Castellamare to Sorrento, or the road between Vietri and Amalfi, where the strange fantastic peaks lead you at last to the solitary and beautiful desert of Paestum, where Greece seems to await you entrenched in silence among the wild flowers….

 

This forgotten way among the olive gardens on the lower slopes of the mountains over the sea, seems to me more joyful than any other road in the world. It leads to Italy. … to the land of heart’s desire, where Pisa lies in the plain under the sorrowful gesture of the mountains like a beautiful mutilated statue, where Arno, parted from Tiber, is lost in the sea, dowered with the glory of Florence, the tribute of the hills, the spoil of many streams, the golden kiss of the sun; while Tuscany, splendid with light and joy, stands neither for God nor for His enemies, but for man, to whom she has given everything really without an afterthought, the songs that shall not be forgotten; the pictures full of youth; and above all Beauty…

 

Thus I, thinking of the way, came to Nervi. Now the way from Genoa out of the Pisan gate to Nervi is none of the pleasantest, being suburb all the way; but those eight chilometri over and done with, there is nothing but delight between you and Spezia. Nervi itself, that surprising place where beauty is all gathered into a nosegay of sea and seashore, will not keep you long… so you set out, leaving Genoa and her suburb at last behind you, and, climbing among olive groves, orange gardens, and flaming oleanders, with here a magnolia flaming with blossom…after another five miles you come to Recco, a modest sleepy village, where it is good to eat and rest. In the afternoon, you may very pleasantly take boat for Camogli, that ancient seafaring place

 

Camogli

In the cool of the afternoon you leave Camogli and climb by the byways to Ruta, whence you may see all the Gulf of Genoa, with the proud city herself in the lap of the mountains… Far away below you lies Rapallo in the crook of the bay among the oleanders and the vines.  It is there you must sleep… Somehow it is always into a dreamless sleep  one falls in Rapallo, that beautiful and guarded place behind Portofino, where the sea is like a lake, so still it is, and all the flowers of the world seem to have run for shelter….

 

Rapallo

And if the road, so far, beggars description… what can I hope to say of the way from Rapallo to Chiavari? Starting early, … you climb … through a whole long day of sunshine, with the song of the cicale ever in your ears, the mysterious long-drawn-out melody of the rispetti of the peasant girls reaching you ever…. So in the twilight pursuing your way you follow the beautiful road to Sestri-Levante

 

Sestri Levante

Many days might be spent among the woods of Sestri, but the road calls from the mountains, and it is ever of Tuscany that you think as you set out at last,  leaving the sea behind you for the hills… It is a far journey from Sestri to Spezia, but with a good horse, in spite of the hill, you may cover it in a single long day from sunrise to sunset… evening finds you at La Foce, the last height before Spezia; and suddenly at a turning of the way the sunset flames before you, staining all the sea with colour, and there lies Tuscany, those fragile , stainless peaks of Carrara faintly glowing in the evening sun purple and blue and gold, with here a flush as of dawn, there the heart of the sunset. And all before you lies the sea, with Spezia and the great ships in its arms; while yonder, like a jewel on the cusp of a horn, Porto Venere shines; and farther still, Lerici in the shadow of the hills washed by the sea, stained by the blood of the sunset, its great castle seeming like some splendid ship in the midst of the waters. From the bleak height of La Foce… one by one the lights of the city appear like great golden night flowers; soon they are answered from the bay, where the ships lie solemnly, sleepily at anchor, and at last the great light of the Pharos throws its warmth over sea and seashore; gathering in the distance of the far horizon, the night, splendid with blue and gold, overwhelms the world, bringing coolness and as it were a sort of reconciliation. So it is quite dark when, weary, at last you find yourself in Spezia, at the foot of the Tuscan hills.

 

Spezia

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 41-46.

Genoa and Vandyck

 According to Edward Hutton, Genoa had no school of painting of its own. It could only boast of foreign painters like Rubens and Anthony Vandyck who came there to work in the early seventeenth century. In particular, he believed that Vandyck's work was transformed and humanized by his experience in Italy. *

 

Anthony Vandyck: Self Portrait

The city of Genoa, herself without a school of painting, had welcomed Rubens not long before very gladly, nor had Vandyck any cause to complain of her ingratitude.  He appears to have set himself to paint in the style of Rubens, choosing similar subjects, at any rate, and thus to have won for himself… a reputation but little inferior to his master’s. Certainly at this time his work is very Flemish in character, and apparently it was not till he had been to Venice and Rome that the influence of Italy and the Italian masters may be really found in his work. A disciple of Titian almost from his youth, it is the work of that master which gradually emancipates him from Flemish barbarism, from a too serious occupation with detail, the over-emphasis on northern work, the mere boisterousness, without any real distinction, that often spoils Rubens for us, and yet is so easily excused and forgotten in the mere joy of life everywhere to be found in it. Well, with this shy and refined mind Italy is able to accomplish her mission; she humanizes him, gives him the Latin sensibility and clarity of mind, the Latin refinement too, so that we are ready to forget that he was Rubens’ countryman… 

 

Much of this enlightening effect that Italy has upon the northerner may be found in the work of Vandyck upon his return to Genoa, really a new thing in the world, as new as the poetry of Spenser had been, at any rate, and with much of his gravity and sweet melancholy or pensiveness, in those magnificent portraits of the Genoese nobility which time and fools have so sadly misused. And as though to confirm us in this thought of him, we may see, as it were, the story of his development during this journey to the south in the sketchbook in the possession of the Duke of Devonshire. Here, amid any number of sketches, thoughts as it were that Titian has suggested, or Giorgione evoked, we see the very dawn of all that we have come to consider as especially his own….

 

Gradually Vandyck, shy and of a quiet, serene spirit… led by the immeasurable glory of the Venetians slowly escapes from that “Flemish manner” to be master of himself; so that, after he has painted in the manner of Titian at Palermo, he returns to Genoa to begin that wonderful series of masterpieces we all know, in which he has immortalized the tragedy of a king, the sorrowful beauty, frail and lonely as a violet, of Henrietta Maria and the fate of the Princes of England. And though many of the pictures he painted in Genoa are dispersed, and many spoiled, some few remain to tell us of his passing. One, a Christ among the Pharisees, is in the Palazzo Bianco, not far from the Palazzo Rosso, on the opposite side of the Via Garibaldi. But here there is a fine Rubens too; a Gerard David… a good Ruysdael, with some characteristic Spanish pictures by Zurbaran, Ribera, and Murillo… it is characteristic of Genoa that our interest in this collection should be with the foreign work there.

 

Vandyck: Genoese Noblewoman
Palazzo Rosso

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 * Note: Edward Hutton had a special liking for King Charles I, the English King executed in 1641, his wife Henrietta Maria, and their two sons who would go on to become King Charles II, and King James I.

 

Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 33-35.

Genoa: Arcades and a Chapel

 

 

Over a hundred years ago Edward Hutton saw Genoa as a living city. It had not become a museum or a tourist mecca. He especially liked the narrow arcaded streets lined with shopkeepers and artisans.

 

As you stand under those strange arcades that run under the houses facing the  port, all that most ancient story of Genoa seems actual, possible; it is as though in some extraordinarily vivid dream you had gone back to less uniform days, when the beauty and the ugliness of the world struggled for mastery, before the overwhelming victory of the machine had enthroned ugliness and threatened the dominion of the soul of man. In that shadowy place, where little shops like caverns open on either side, with here a woman grinding coffee, there a shoemaker at his last, yonder a smith making copper pipkins, a sailor buying ropes, and old woman cheapening apples, everything seems to have stood still from century to century. There you will surely see the mantilla worn as in Spain, while the smell of ships, whose masts every now and then you may see, a whole forest of them, in the harbour, the bells of the mules, the splendour of the most ancient sun, remind you only of old things, the long ways of the great sea, the roads and the deserts and the mountains, the joy that cometh with the morning, so that there at any rate Genoa is as she ever was, a city of noisy shadowy ways, cool in the heat full of life, movement, merchandise, and women. (23-24) …

 

These narrow shadowy ways full of men and women and joyful with children are the delight of Genoa. There is but little to see, you may think, --little enough but just life. For Genoa is not a museum; she lives, and the laughter of her children is the greatest of all the joyful poems of Italy, maybe the only one that is immortal.

 

With this thought in your heart… you return to the arcades, and turning to your left till you come to the Via S. Lorenzo, in which is the Duomo all of white and black marble, a jewel with mystery in its heart, hidden away among the houses of life. …

Within, the church is dark, and this I think is a disappointment, nor is it very rich or lovely. … the only remarkable thing in the church itself is the chapel of St. John Baptist, into which no woman may enter, because of the dancing of Salome, daughter of Herodias. There in a marble urn the ashes of the Messenger have lain for eight centuries, not without worship, for here have knelt Pope Alexander III, our own Richard Cordelion, Federigo Barbarossa, Henry IV after Canossa, Innocent IV, fugitive before Federigo II, Henry VII of Germany, St. Catherine of Siena, and often too, St. Catherine Adorni, Louis XII of France, Don Juan of Austria after Lepanto, and maybe, who knows, Velasquez of Spain, Vandyck from England, and behind them, all the misery of Genoa through the centuries, an immense and pitiful company of men and women crying in the silence to him who had cried in the wilderness. (26-7)

 

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Genoa, Gateway to Italy

 

The first edition of Edward Hutton's, Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, appeared in 1907. He began his tour with Genoa, which he regarded as the gateway to Italy. Appropriately, it was named after Janus, the Roman guard of gates from whom the month of January also gets its name. These highlights are taken from the second edition of 1908.

 

The traveller who on his way to Italy passes along the Riviera di Ponente through Marseilles, Nice, and Mentone to Ventimiglia, or crossing the Alps touches Italian soil, though scarcely Italy indeed, at Turin, on coming to Genoa finds himself really at last in the South, the true South, of which Genoa la Superba is the gate, her narrow streets, the various life of her port, her picturesque colour and dirt, her immense palaces of precious marbles, her oranges and pomegranates and lemons, her armsful of children, and above all the sun, which lends an eternal gladness to all these characteristic or delightful things, telling him at once that the North is far behind, that even Cisalpine Gaul is crossed and done with, and that here at last by the waves of that old and great sea is the true Italy, that beloved and ancient  land to which we owe almost everything that is precious and valuable in our lives, and in which still, if we be young, we may find all our dreams. …

And so, in some dim way I cannot explain, to come to Italy is like coming home, as though after a long journey one were to come suddenly upon one’s mistress at a corner of a lane in a shady place.

 

It is perhaps with some such joy in the heart as this that the fortunate traveller will come to Genoa the Proud, by the sea, lying on the bosom of the mountains, whiter than the foam of her waves, the beautiful gate of Italy.

 

The history of Genoa, its proud and adventurous story, is almost wholly a tale of the sea, full of mystery, cruelty, and beauty, a legend of sea power, a romance of ships. It is a narrative in which sailors, half merchants, half pirates, adventurers every one, put out from the city and return laden with all sorts of spoil,--gold from Africa, slaves from Tunis or Morocco, the booty of the Crusades; with here the vessel of the Holy Grail bought at a great price, there the stolen dust of a great Saint.

 

The spirit of adventure, which established the power of Genoa in the East, which crushed Pisa and almost overcame Venice, was held in check and controlled by the spirit of gain, the dream of the merchant, so that Columbus, the very genius of adventure almost without an after-thought, though a Genoese, was not encouraged, was indeed laughed at; and Genoa, splendid in adventure but working only for gain, unable on this account to establish any permanent colony, losing gradually all her possessions, threw to the Spaniard the dominion of the New World, just because she was not worthy of it….

 

Thus Genoa appears to us of old and now, too, as a city of merchants. … What Philip of Spain did for God’s sake, what Visconti did for power, what Cesare Borgia did for glory, Genoa has done for gold. She is a merchant adventurer. Her true work was the bank of St. George. One of the most glorious and splendid cities of Italy, she is, almost in that home of humanism, without a school of art or a poet or even a philosopher. Her heroes are the great admirals, and adventurers—Spinola, Doria, Grimaldi, Fieschi, men whose names linger in many a ruined castle along the coast who of old met piracy with piracy. Even today a Grimaldi spoils Europe at Monaco, as his ancestors did of old.

 

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Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp.1-5.

San Sepolcro and Piero della Francesca

 Edward Hutton concluded "Siena and Southern Tuscany" in Arezzo, but in that chapter he did include a side trip by rail to Borgo San Sepolcro to see the famous Resurrection by Piero della Francesca.

 

But the most beautiful of all these treasures to which Arezzo holds the key is Borgo San Sepolcro in the Tiber Valley. … There are very few things more lovely in the world than the upper valley of the Arno, but one of them is, I think, the upper valley of the Tiber. It is a landscape more virile than Umbria—a landscape by Piero della Francesca, in fact, and in Borgo it is his work you find, for the little town is his birthplace.

 

That “Resurrection of Christ” in the Municipio is perhaps the most beautiful representation of the triumph of Christ in the world. …

 

The fresco of the resurrection comes upon us with a kind of surprise; we had not suspected Piero of so much thoughtfulness. It is as though he had listened to some voice, or seen a vision, or on some fortunate day had been led away the captive of Love, … In the cold light of the earliest morning, mere sunless dawn as yet, Christ has risen and is standing in His tomb. His experience is in His face, the dawn of knowledge, perhaps of the sorrows of humanity. It is as though for the first time He had really understood the power of evil, to which, after all, we are so unwillingly the slaves, the hopeless misery of that state of imperfect love. The noise of Hell has furrowed His face, and He has only just escaped into our quiet world. Beneath that terrible and beautiful figure… lie four soldiers, sleeping in the noiseless twilight. Behind the green trees on the right the first exquisite frail light of dawn is coming to comfort the world, and with the return of the Prince of Life the first day of spring has come; already the flowers have blossomed and the trees have budded behind Him as he came out of the sunrise, and when he shall turn at last into the garden, where Mary will find Him, those bare boughs, that naked hill-side, that brown and sterile earth will quicken, too, even as the hills that He has already crossed. All the passion of the encounter with Death and the dead is graven on His face, and though men sleep He can know no rest; He is up before them, and the whole long day is waiting for Him…. For Piero has expressed not only the old magical truths of Paganism and Christianity, the joy of the world at the coming of Spring, the triumph of the Prince of Life in a world pallid with the fear of Death, but the subtler and more terrible thoughts, too, of the age of thought that was just then dawning on the world. …

 

It was as such things as these in my heart that I made my way back to Arezzo, and, regretting them, took my leave of Southern Tuscany.

 

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