On the next floor, up another marble staircase, were still other business offices,—shipping firms, wine-factors and one Guiseppe Bellini, representing an American factory, whose output of agricultural machinery is found in all four quarters of the globe. Breakfast foods were there, too, and there was a big lithograph of a Fall River Line Steamer on the walls. A whole city of merchants and agents were cloistered here in the five stories of this one-time ducal abode.
Up under the roof was a photographer and an artist’s studio, where a long-haired Italian (Signor something or other, the sign read) painted the bluest of blue sky pictures, and the most fiery Vesuvian eruptions, to sell to tourists through the medium of the hotel porters of the town below.
Thus it was that an antique shrine of gallantry and romance had become the temple of twentieth century commerce. The noble arms, with a heraldic angel still to be seen over the entrance doorway, count for nothing to-day, but exist as a vivid reminder of a glorious past. In 1500 the palace was the shrine of an artistic nobility; to-day it is a temple of chicanery.
The new part of Genoa imitates Milan, as Milan imitates Paris. The galleries or arcades of Milan, Genoa and Naples, full of shops, cafés and restaurants, would be admirable institutions in a more northerly clime, where the sun is less strong and rain more frequent. Here their glass roofs radiate an insufferable heat, which only in the coldest and most intemperate months is at all bearable. Nevertheless these arcades are an amusing and characteristic feature of the large Italian cities.
Hotels in Genoa for the automobilist are of all ranks and at all prices. Bertolini’s has garage accommodation for twenty-five automobiles, and charges two francs and a half to four francs a night for the accommodation, which is dear or not accordingly as you may feel.
The Albergo Unione, on the Palazzo Campetto, has no garage (you will have to seek out the F. I. A. T. garage a mile or more away), but you get something that is thoroughly Italian and very well appointed too, at most reasonable prices.
The Genoese suburban villas are a part of Genoa itself, in that they were built and inhabited by nobles of the city.
