Yet Genoa is clearly benefited by her present political connection. From her lovely bay, she looks out over the Mediterranean, Corsica, Sardinia, Africa and the Levant, but has scarcely a glimpse of the continent of Italy. No river bears its products to her expectant wharves; only the most insignificant mill-streams brawl idly down to her harbor and the adjacent shore; steep, naked mountains rise abruptly behind her, scarcely allowing room for her lofty edifices and narrow streets; while from only a few miles back the waters are hurrying to join the Po and be borne away by that rapid, unnavigable stream to the furthest limit of Italy. No commercial City was ever more hardly dealt with by Nature on the land side than Genoa; no one ever stood more in need of intimate political connections suggestive of and cemented by works of Internal improvement. These she is now on the point of securing. A very tolerable Railroad has already been constructed from Turin to Arquata, some seventy miles on the way to Genoa, and the remaining thirty odd miles are now under contract, to be completed in 1852. The portion constructed was easy, while the residue is exceedingly difficult, following the valleys of impetuous mountain torrents, which to-day discharge each minute five gallons and to-morrow five thousand hogsheads. These valleys (or rather clefts) are quite commonly so narrow and their sides so steep and rock-bound that the Railroad track has to be raised several feet on solid masonry to preserve it from being washed away by the floods which follow every violent or protracted rain. Expensive arches to admit the passage of the streams whenever crossed, and of the roads, are also numerous, so that these thirty miles, in spite of the abundance and cheapness of Labor here, will cost at least Three Millions of Dollars. Yet the road will pay when in full operation, and will prove a new day-spring of prosperity to Genoa. From Turin, branches or feeders will run to the Alps in various directions, benefiting that city considerably, but Genoa infinitely more, since nine-tenths of the produce even of Piedmont will run past Turin, without unloading, to find purchasers and exporters here. A coal-mine of promise has just been discovered at Aosta, at the foot of the Alps, to which one of these branches is to be constructed. Genoa is now jealous of Turin's political ascendency, which is just as sensible as would be jealousy of Albany on the part of New-York. Even already, though it has not come near her, the Railroad is sensibly improving her trade and industry; and whenever it shall have reached her wharves every mile added to its extent or to that of any of its branches will add directly and largely to the commerce and wealth of this city. In time this Road will connect with those of France and Germany, by a tunnel through some one of the Alps (Mount Cenis is now under consideration), but, even without that, whenever it shall have reached the immediate base of the Alps on this side and been responded to by similar extensions of the French and Rhine-valley Railroads on the other, Genoa will supplant Marseilles while continuing preferable to Trieste as the point of embarkation for Cairo and Suez on the direct route from England and Paris for India, China and Southern Asia generally, and can only be superseded in that preëminence by a railroad running hence or from Lake Maggiore and Milan direct to Naples or Salerno—a work of whose construction through so many petty and benighted principalities there is no present probability.
Still, Sardinia has very much before her unaccomplished. She needs first of all things an efficient and comprehensive system of Popular Education. With the enormous superabundance of Sixty Thousand Priests and other Ecclesiastics to a generally poor population of Four Millions, she has not to-day five thousand teachers, good, bad and indifferent, of elementary and secular knowledge. These black-coated gentry fairly overshadow the land with their shovel hats, so that Corn has no fair chance of sunshine. The Churches of this City alone must have cost Ten Millions of Dollars—for you cannot walk a hundred steps without passing one; and the wealth lavished in their construction and adornment exceeds all belief—while all the common school-houses in Genoa would not bring fifty thousand dollars. The best minds of the country are now pondering the urgent necessity of speedily establishing a system of efficient Popular Education.
But the Nation is deeply in debt, and laboring under heavy burdens. Its Industry is inefficient, its Commerce meager, its Revenues slender, while the imminent peril of Austrian invasion compels the keeping up of an Army of Fifty Thousand effective men ready to take the field at a moment's warming. But for the notorious and active hostility of three-fourths of Continental Europe to the liberal policy of its rulers, Sardinia might dispense with three-fourths of this force and save its heavy cost for Education and Internal Improvement. As things are, women must toil in the fields while Physical and Mental Improvement must wait in order that the Nation may sustain in virtual idleness Fifty Thousand Soldiers and Sixty Thousand Priests.
Yet mighty are the blessings of Freedom, even under the greatest disadvantages. Turin is now increasing in Industry and Population with a rapidity unknown to its former history. Looking only at the new buildings just erected or now in progress, you might mistake it for an American city. Unless checked by future wars, Turin will double its population between 1850 and 1860. Genoa has but recently and partially felt the new impulse, yet even here the march of improvement is visible. Three years more of peace will witness the substitution for its long period of stagnation and decay of an activity surpassed by that of no city in Europe.
Turin is eligibly located and well built, most of the houses being large, tall, and the walls of decided strength and thickness; but Genoa is even superior in most respects if not in all. I never saw so many churches so admirably constructed and so gorgeously, laboriously ornamented as the half dozen I visited yesterday and this morning. My guide says there are sixty churches in Genoa (a city about the size of Boston, though with fewer houses and a much smaller area than Brooklyn), and that they are nearly all built and adorned with similar if not equal disregard of cost. A modest, graceful monument to Christopher Columbus, the Genoese discoverer of America, was one of the first structures that met my eye on entering the city, and an eating-house in the square of the chief theater is styled "Café Restaurant à l'Immortel Chr. Columbo," or something very near that. I never before saw so many admirable specimens of costly and graceful architecture as have arrested my attention in wandering through the streets of Genoa. At least half the houses were constructed for the private residences of "merchant princes" in the palmy days of "Genoa the Superb," and their wealth would seem to have been practically boundless. The "Hotel de Londres," in which I write, was originally a convent, and no house in New-York can vie with it in the massiveness of its walls, the hight of its ceilings, &c. My bed-room, appropriately furnished, would shame almost any American parlor or drawing-room. All around me testifies of the greatness that has been; who shall say that it is not soon to return? The narrow streets (very few of them passable by carriages) and uneven ground-plot are the chief drawbacks on this magnificence; but the city rises so regularly and gracefully from the harbor as to seem like a glorious amphitheater, and the inequality, so wearisome to the legs, is a beauty and a pleasure to the eye. It gives, besides, opportunity for the finest Architectural triumphs. The Carignani Church is approached by a massive bridge thrown across a ravine, from which you look down on the tops of seven-story houses, and I walked this morning in a public garden which looks down into a private one some sixty feet below it. The perpendicular stone wall which separates these gardens is at least five feet thick at the top, and must have cost an immense sum; but in fact the whole city has been three times completely walled in, and the latest and most extensive of these walls is still in good condition, and was successfully defended by Massena in the siege of 1800, until Famine compelled him to surrender. May that stand recorded to the end of human history as the last siege of Genoa!
XXII.
[This letter, written and mailed at Leghorn on the 24th, has never come to hand, having been entrusted to the tender mercies of the French mail which was to leave Leghorn next day by steamer for Marseilles, and thence be taken, via Paris, to Havre, and by steamship to this city. The wretched old apology for a steamship whereon I had reached Leghorn (80 miles) in eighteen hours from Genoa may not yet have completed her return passage between those ports, though I think she has; but whether her officers know enough to receive and deliver a Mail-bag is exceedingly doubtful. If they did, I see not how my letter can have been stopped this side of Marseilles. I remember that it did particular justice to French Government steamships in the Mediterranean and to American Consuls in Italy, showing how our traveling countrymen are crucified between the worthlessness of the former and the rapacity of the latter. Our Consuls may well rejoice that said Letter XXII. comes up missing, and perhaps the Tuscan Police has cause to join in their exultation.