If Genoa is a fair city by day, she is a still fairer one by night, when the innumerable lights on all sides make it look as if the stars had come down from heaven, and give the whole place an appearance of fairy-land. There are lights all round the harbor and on the quays; lights above the hills, and below in the old town; lights in the gardens of the cafés and in the streets, making them, and the gay company that crowds them, more brilliant than when seen in the full glare of mid-day. The fireflies flit and flicker, but never rest as they hold their evening revels among the bushes and trees, and over the grass and flowers.
A charity bazaar was held every night on the Acqua Sola, when the fountains were illuminated with gas, and rings of light spanned the trunks of the great trees, and darling arches were placed over the garden paths. All the decorations were exceedingly pretty and light, as they were of gas arranged to represent branches of laurel, or lyres, or such like devices. There were not many stalls,—two dozen, perhaps; but these were in the fanciful shape of chalet or kiosk, and the Genoese ladies, in their temporary character of shopwomen, sat within them, with no covering on their heads but a white veil, and a rose at one side.
The orthodox band played inside the fair, for part of the garden was walled off, so only to admit of those who had tickets; whilst another band just outside appeared to be trying hard to outblow it. A little farther on, at the Café d’ltalie, the band of the Guides, in their light blue and silver uniform, charm the eaters of ice and drinkers of lemonade by their music, and make them linger at their little tables.
This place is a favorite resort in the evening of the Genoese men (where they put all the women is a mystery, as the streets are crowded with the nobler sex of every class, whilst scarce any Italian fair ones of any kind are to be seen), and it is, for light and brilliancy, a very transformation scene. The lamps gleam from amidst beds of flowers and groves of orange-trees that make the air faint with their sweetness; and in the centre of the garden, under a kind of tent, is a large cocoanut-tree, with a branching green head and a cluster of lamps beneath to represent the fruit. And from the statues and fountains, and trees and arches, rose-colored and white lamps are hung, and being all of ground glass, they shed a subdued, mysterious light around the idlers who crowd the seats and benches. In fact, Genoa never looks as if she intended to go to bed at all; and the cool summer nights, the stars, the lamps, the sweet scent of the flowers, and the bands of music make it so pleasant a time that one cares not to think of to-morrow.
THE ALHAMBRA.
S. P. SCOTT.
[Among the many marvels of architecture left by the Mohammedans, as landmarks of their outflow over the earth, none have elicited more admiration than the remains of the Alhambra at Granada. This celebrated group of Saracenic edifices has suffered little from time, but much from ignorance and vandalism, of which the most deplorable instance is the demolition due to the Emperor Charles V., in his insane effort to better the work of the Moors. This palace and fortress of the Moorish caliphs of Spain is eloquently described in the following selection.]
Few readers need to be told that the kingdom of Granada at the period of the Conquest was one of the richest and most flourishing countries in the world. Its fertile valleys embraced the garden of the Peninsula; its industrious population had carried agriculture to a degree of perfection unknown to modern times; its mountains yielded great quantities of the precious metals; its manufactures of silk and porcelain found a ready market in the courts of semi-barbaric Europe; the commerce of Almeria and Malaga, its principal seaports, extended to the Indies. As the victorious arms of Castile and Aragon gradually encroached upon the provinces of Andalusia, the remains of that extraordinary civilization which, in the ninth and tenth centuries, had raised the Western khalifate to such a height of prosperity and renown, took refuge in Granada. To the beautiful capital, that included within its walls nearly half a million souls,—among them many thousand Jews and Christians,—fled the exiles of the conquered cities, bringing with them that advanced knowledge of the natural and exact sciences which, after surviving the vicissitudes of four hundred years of revolution and invasion, the ferocious bigotry of the Spanish clergy, more intolerant by far than the rude barbarism of Africa, threatened with utter extinction.