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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