With the World's Great Travellers, Volume 3

by Unknown

Every one who has ever visited Genoa is familiar with the Via degli Orefici,—its quaint small shops, its stalls, and its marvels of elegance in filigree-work, and its wealth of bonbons and cakes. The beautiful mild face of the Madonna in the picture belonging to the Goldsmiths’ Company still gazes placidly down from her shrine on the traffic below.

The artist who painted this picture was called Pellegrino Piola, and was a pupil of Castello, who, it is said, caused him to be assassinated from motives of jealousy. A prize had been offered by the Goldsmiths’ Company for the best painting of a Holy Family, and Pellegrino, who was only twenty-two years of age at the time, was the one to gain it.

Every shop in the Via degli Orefici that is not filled with jewelry is full of sweets; and chemists, grocers, and basket-makers are all confectioners, or sweet-stuff sellers, as well. The little girls in their white dresses and veils, who have just made their first communion, carry baskets of bonbons in their hands, and one, too poor in station, perhaps, to possess so extensive a present, wears a necklace of nuts round her throat, with a cake by way of locket. The owner of the big Bologna sausage, decorated with a pink camellia, has just placed a small white-napkin-covered table in the door-way of his shop, so that he may eat his dinner in a position to see and be seen by his friends in the street. The Genoese salesman does not allow his domestic arrangements to interfere with his business; and a young lady who was cooking the mid-day meal at a little charcoal stove has just removed a saucepan from the fire to tell the price of a counterpane.

The lemonade seller has pitched his tent in the sunniest corner of the Piazza delle Fontane Amorose, and calls aloud to thirsty thousands as they pass, “Fres-ca, fres-ca.” His emporium is very like a small four-post bedstead, and its chintz curtains are wreathed with lemons on boughs. And lemons bob up and down in cool-looking tin tanks filled with water, but the lemonade itself seems guiltless of such an article, except for a minute portion of the peel of one which floats in it.

When tired of the gold and silver filigree-work, and the coral ornaments, let the wanderer turn into the Street of Palaces. Here his eyes will not be distracted by stalls of fluttering shawls and handkerchiefs, or his progress impeded by stoves for the roasting of chestnuts or baking of apples, but even in this aristocratic quarter of the town mules will obstinately dispute the right of road with him, and some agility is required to keep clear of them and of the carriages. There are no pavements in Genoa, excepting in the new streets, and the heads of the horses belonging to the grand carriages are so bedecked with long horse-hair tassels and fur trimmings, and their tails tied up with such smart satin ribbons, that they cannot be expected to think of anything besides their personal appearance, much less the pedestrian’s feet.

The Serra Palace is famous for its “golden” room, the panels of which are of lapis lazuli. The Brignole is famous for its pictures, especially some wonderfully beautiful Vandykes. This gallery is now joined to that once belonging to the Durazzo Palace, but which by death became the property of the former, and the two are united in the Palazzo Rosso, or Brignole. The Café della Concordia is opposite, and is entered by a flower-shop, up a marble staircase, and through a court with a fountain and statue and weeping-willows that make a pleasant shade, and where you can sit amidst orange-trees and myrtles and eat your breakfast or dinner, if you prefer it to going inside. The Concordia is the prettiest little place imaginable, and the scent of the flowers and the splashing of the water are very refreshing coming in from the hot dusty street. There is also the Café Mathurin in the Piazza San Carlo Felice, good and reasonable in price, but more bustling and far less romantic than the weeping-willowy Concordia. The Royal Palace is handsomely furnished, and contains some valuable pictures amidst a great deal of rubbish. The rooms are fairly proportioned, and the furniture, though somewhat faded, is in good taste....

The once powerful family of Doria are possessed of numerous palaces and villas in and about Genoa. The Palazzo Doria, just outside the Porta di San Tomaso, however, is the one in which the great Andrea Doria lived. It was given to him in 1522, when he rebuilt and improved it. It is now very much out of repair, and the only portions of it shown to strangers are the rooms formerly inhabited by him. There is not much furniture of any kind in the old Admiral’s bedroom; but the blue and white plates he was in the habit of using at dinner are ranged in rows, at the back of a large fireplace, on a thing somewhat resembling a kitchen dresser. A large gilt arm-chair, once the property of Charles V., is in the drawing room. It is a heavy-looking article, with a red velvet seat. It was this monarch who granted Doria the title of “Il Principe.” Life-sized frescoes of him and of his sons appear in a gallery leading to a terraced garden outside, and in these the portrait of Andrea is that of a very brown old gentleman, with white hair and beard, and but small allowance of clothes on. The sons, who are also in “semi-heroic” costume, imitate Adam before the fall, except that each wears a helmet and leans on a shield.

These frescoes are the work of Pierino del Vaga, who, having been obliged to seek refuge at Genoa from the calamities of Rome in 1527, was patronized by the great Doria, and intrusted to decorate his palace. Genoa has been the birthplace of many painters, and art was in its most flourishing condition in this city in the fifteenth century, during which time Giovanni Cambiaso lived. At this epoch, so many persons of noble family were painters, that the Genoese, by a special decree, raised painting from a trade to a profession, declaring that it was a liberal art, and might be practised without derogating from nobility. The reason of the sudden decline of the Genoese school is attributed to the plague in 1657, when many of its chief painters fell victims to the disease. Lazzaro Calvi, who lived one hundred and five years, was born in 1502, and therefore died just fifty years prior to the epidemic, so that his country may congratulate itself that he was not cut off prematurely in the flower of his youth by that scourge.

At the back of the palace is the grave of Andrea’s dog, Roldano, given to him by Charles V., and over it is the following epitaph, or something like it: “Here lies the Great Roldano, a dog belonging to Prince Gio. Andrea Doria, who, for his fidelity and goodness, was considered to merit this memorial. In life, for years, he nobly obeyed both these laws. In death we must place his ashes by the side of those of the beast that perishes. A companion worthy indeed of his regal donor. Died at 11 years and 10 months of age, in September of 1605, the 8th day, at 8 o’clock at night.”

In the centre of the garden, facing the sea, and from whence Prince Doria may have looked on his fleet of twenty-two galleys at anchor in the harbor, is a fountain, and in it a statue in which he is represented as Neptune. Doria’s tomb is in the crypt beneath the high altar of the church of San Matteo, and it is here also that the sword he received, in 1535, from Paul III., for the services he had rendered the church, is deposited. In the piazza adjoining there is a house with an inscription over it, to the effect that it was given to Andrea Doria by the republic. Here he once lived, and it was in an open square in front of it that he assembled his fellow-citizens to consult with them on the best way of repulsing the French, when they besieged Genoa in 1528. The house is now used as a shop,—for pictures and old furniture on the ground floor, and for stationery on the upper story. It, and the church of San Matteo, which has always been under the patronage of the Dorias, are both built of alternate layers of black and white marble. This magpie style of construction was confined to public edifices, but four patrician families—the Doria, Grimaldi, Spinola, and Fieschi—were allowed the privilege of using it....