The Mediterranean: Its Storied Cities and Venerable Ruins

There is one marked peculiarity of the Promenade des Anglais, however, which at once distinguishes it from any similar group of private houses to be found anywhere in England. There the British love of privacy, which has, of course, its good points, but has also its compensating disadvantages, leads almost every owner of beautiful grounds or gardens to enclose them with a high fence or with the hideous monstrosity known to suburban Londoners as “park paling.” This plan, while it ensures complete seclusion for the fortunate few within, shuts out the deserving many outside from all participation in the beauty of the grounds or the natural scenery. On the Promenade des Anglais, on the contrary, a certain generous spirit of emulation in contributing to the public enjoyment and the general effectiveness of the scene as a whole has prompted the owners of the villas along the sea-front to enclose their gardens only with low ornamental balustrades or with a slight and unobtrusive iron fence, so that the passers-by can see freely into every one of them, and feast their eyes on the beautiful shrubs and flowers. The houses and grounds thus form a long line of delightful though undoubtedly garish and ornate decorations, in full face of the sea. The same plan has been adopted in the noble residential street known as Euclid Avenue at Cleveland, Ohio, and in many other American cities. It is to be regretted that English tastes and habits do not oftener thus permit their wealthier classes to contribute, at no expense or trouble to themselves, to the general pleasure of less fortunate humanity.

The Promenade is, of course, during the season the focus and center of fashionable life at Nice. Here carriages roll, and amazons ride and flâneurs lounge in the warm sunshine during the livelong afternoon. In front are the baths, bathing being practicable at Nice from the beginning of March; behind are the endless hotels and clubs of this city of strangers. For the English are not alone on the Promenade des Anglais; the American tongue is heard there quite as often as the British dialect, while Germans, Russians, Poles, and Austrians cluster thick upon the shady seats beneath the planes and carob-trees. During the Carnival especially Nice resolves itself into one long orgy of frivolous amusement. Battles of flowers, battles of confetti, open-air masquerades, and universal tom-foolery pervade the place. Everybody vies with everybody else in making himself ridiculous; and even the staid Briton, released from the restraints of home or the City, abandons himself contentedly for a week at a time to a sort of prolonged and glorified sunny southern Derby Day. Mr. Bultitude disguises himself as a French clown; Mr. Dombey, in domino, flings roses at his friends on the seats of the tribune. Everywhere is laughter, noise, bustle, and turmoil; everywhere the manifold forms of antique saturnalian freedom, decked out with gay flowers or travestied in quaint clothing, but imported most incongruously for a week in the year into the midst of our modern work-a-day twentieth-century Europe.

Only a comparatively few winters ago fashionable Nice consisted almost entirely of the Promenade des Anglais, with a few slight tags and appendages in either direction. At its eastern end stood (and still stands) the Jardin Public, that paradise of children and of be-ribboned French nursemaids, where the band discourses lively music every afternoon at four, and all the world sits round on two-sou chairs to let all the rest of the world see for itself it is still in evidence. These, and the stately quays along the Paillon bank, lined with shops where female human nature can buy all the tastiest and most expensive gewgaws in Europe, constituted the real Nice of the early eighties. But with the rapid growth of that general taste for more sumptuous architecture which marks our age, the Phocæan city woke up a few years since with electric energy to find itself in danger of being left behind by its younger competitors. So the Niçois conscript fathers put their wise heads together, in conclave assembled, and resolved on a general transmogrification of the center of their town. By continuously bridging and vaulting across the almost dry bed of the Paillon torrent they obtained a broad and central site for a new large garden, which now forms the natural focus of the transformed city. On the upper end of this important site they erected a large and handsome casino in the gorgeous style of the Third Republic, all glorious without and within, as the modern Frenchman understands such glory, and provided with a theater, a winter garden, restaurants, cafés, ball-rooms, petits chevaux, and all the other most pressing requirements of an advanced civilization. But in doing this they sacrificed by the way the beautiful view towards the mountains behind, which can now only be obtained from the Square Masséna or the Pont Vieux farther up the river. Most visitors to Nice, however, care little for views, and a great deal for the fitful and fearsome joys embodied to their minds in the outward and visible form of a casino.

This wholesale bridging over of the lower end of the Paillon has united the French and Italian towns and abolished the well-marked boundary line which once cut them off so conspicuously from one another. The inevitable result has been that the Italian town too has undergone a considerable modernization along the sea-front, so that the Promenade des Anglais and the Promenade du Midi now practically merge into one continuous parade, and are lined along all their length with the same clipped palm-trees and the same magnificent white palatial buildings. When the old theater in the Italian town was burnt down in the famous and fatal conflagration some years since the municipality erected a new one on the same site in the most approved style of Parisian luxury. A little behind lie the Préfecture and the beautiful flower market, which no visitor to Nice should ever miss; for Nice is above all things, even more than Florence, a city of flowers. The sheltered quarter of the Ponchettes, lying close under the lee of the Castle Hill, has become of late, owing to these changes, a favorite resort for invalids, who find here protection from the cutting winds which sweep with full force down the bare and open valley of the Paillon over the French town.

I am loth to quit that beloved sea-front, on the whole the most charming marine parade in Europe, with the Villefranche point and the pseudo-Gothic, pseudo-Oriental monstrosity of Smith’s Folly on one side and the delicious bay towards Antibes on the other. But there are yet various aspects of Nice which remain to be described: the interior is almost as lovely in its way as the coast that fringes it. For this inner Nice, the Place Masséna, called (like the Place Garibaldi) after another distinguished native, forms the starting point and center. Here the trams from all quarters run together at last; hence the principal roads radiate in all directions. The Place Masséna is the center of business, as the Jardin Public and the Casino are the centers of pleasure. Also (verbum sap.) it contains an excellent pâtisserie, where you can enjoy an ice or a little French pastry with less permanent harm to your constitution and morals than anywhere in Europe. Moreover, it forms the approach to the Avenue de la Gare, which divides with the Quays the honor of being the best shopping street in the most fashionable watering-place of the Mediterranean. If these delights thy soul may move, why, the Place Masséna is the exact spot to find them in.

Other great boulevards, like the Boulevard Victor Hugo and the Boulevard Dubouchage, have been opened out of late years to let the surplus wealth that flows into Nice in one constant stream find room to build upon. Châteaux and gardens are springing up merrily on every side; the slopes of the hills gleam gay with villas; Cimiez and Carabacel, once separate villages, have now been united by continuous dwellings to the main town; and before long the city where Garibaldi was born and where Gambetta lies buried will swallow up in itself the entire space of the valley, and its border spurs from mountain to mountain. The suburbs, indeed, are almost more lovely in their way than the town itself; and as one wanders at will among the olive-clad hills to westward, looking down upon the green lemon-groves that encircle the villas, and the wealth of roses that drape their sides, one cannot wonder that Joseph de Maistre, another Niçois of distinction, in the long dark evenings he spent at St. Petersburg, should time and again have recalled with a sigh “ce doux vallon de Magnan.” Nor have the Russians themselves failed to appreciate the advantages of the change, for they flock by thousands to the Orthodox Quarter on the heights of Saint Philippe, which rings round the Greek chapel erected in memory of the Czarewitch Nicholas Alexandrowitch, who died at Nice in 1865.

After all, however, to the lover of the picturesque Nice town itself is but the threshold and starting point for that lovely country which spreads on all sides its endless objects of interest and scenic beauty from Antibes to Mentone. The excursions to be made from it in every direction are simply endless. Close by lie the monastery and amphitheater of Cimiez; the Italianesque cloisters and campanile of St. Pons; the conspicuous observatory on the Mont Gros, with its grand Alpine views; the hillside promenades of Le Ray and Les Fontaines. Farther afield the carriage-road up the Paillon valley leads direct to St. André through a romantic limestone gorge, which terminates at last in a grotto and natural bridge, overhung by the moldering remains of a most southern château. A little higher up, the steep mountain track takes one on to Falicon, perched “like an eagle’s nest” on its panoramic hill-top, one of the most famous points of view among the Maritime Alps. The boundary hills of the Magnan, covered in spring with the purple flowers of the wild gladiolus; the vine-clad heights of Le Bellet, looking down on the abrupt and rock-girt basin of the Var; the Valley of Hepaticas, carpeted in March with innumerable spring blossoms; the longer drive to Contes in the very heart of the mountains: all alike are lovely, and all alike tempt one to linger in their precincts among the shadow of the cypress trees or under the cool grottos green and lush with spreading fronds of wild maidenhair.

Among so many delicious excursions it were invidious to single out any for special praise; yet there can be little doubt that the most popular, at least with the general throng of tourists, is the magnificent coast-road by Villefranche (or Villafranca) to Monte Carlo and Monaco. This particular part of the coast, between Nice and Mentone, is the one where the main range of the Maritime Alps, abutting at last on the sea, tumbles over sheer with a precipitous descent from four thousand feet high to the level of the Mediterranean. Formerly, the barrier ridge could only be surmounted by the steep but glorious Corniche route; of late years, however, the French engineers, most famous of road-makers, have hewn an admirable carriage-drive out of the naked rock, often through covered galleries or tunnels in the cliff itself, the whole way from Nice to Monte Carlo and Mentone. The older portion of this road, between Nice and Villefranche, falls well within the scope of our present subject.

You leave modern Nice by the quays and the Pont Garibaldi, dash rapidly through the new broad streets that now intersect the Italian city, skirt the square basins lately added to the more shapeless ancient Greek port of Limpia, and begin to mount the first spurs of the Mont Boron among the villas and gardens of the Quartier du Lazaret. Banksia roses fall in cataracts over the walls as you go; looking back, the lovely panorama of Nice opens out before your eyes. In the foreground, the rocky islets of La Réserve foam white with the perpetual plashing of that summer sea. In the middle distance, the old Greek harbor, with its mole and lighthouse, stands out against the steep rocks of the Castle Hill. The background rises up in chain on chain of Alps, allowing just a glimpse at their base of that gay and fickle promenade and all the Parisian prettinesses of the new French town. The whole forms a wonderful picture of the varied Mediterranean world, Greek, Roman, Italian, French, with the vine-clad hills and orange-groves behind merging slowly upward into the snow-bound Alps.

Turning the corner of the Mont Boron by the grotesque vulgarisms of the Château Smith (a curious semi-oriental specimen of the shell-grotto order of architecture on a gigantic scale) a totally fresh view bursts upon our eyes of the Rade de Villefranche, that exquisite land-locked bay bounded on one side by the scarped crags of the Mont Boron itself, and on the other by the long and rocky peninsula of St. Jean, which terminates in the Cap Ferrat and the Villefranche light. The long deep bay forms a favorite roadstead and rendezvous for the French Mediterranean squadron, whose huge ironclad monsters may often be seen ploughing their way in single file from seaward round the projecting headlands, or basking at ease on the calm surface of that glassy pond. The surrounding heights, of course, bristle with fortifications, which, in these suspicious days of armed European tension, the tourist and the sketcher are strictly prohibited from inspecting with too attentive an eye. The quaintly picturesque town of Villefranche itself, Italian and dirty, but amply redeemed by its slender bell-tower and its olive-clad terraces, nestles snugly at the very bottom of its pocket-like bay. The new road to Monte Carlo leaves it far below, with true modern contempt for mere old-world beauty; the artist and the lover of nature will know better than to follow the example of those ruthless engineers; they will find many subjects for a sketch among those whitewashed walls, and many a rare sea-flower tucked away unseen among those crannied crags.

And now, when all is said and done, I, who have known and loved Nice for so many bright winters, feel only too acutely how utterly I have failed to set before those of my readers who know it not the infinite charms of that gay and rose-wreathed queen of the smiling Riviera. For what words can paint the life and movement of the sparkling sea-front? the manifold humors of the Jardin Public? the southern vivacity of the washer-women who pound their clothes with big stones in the dry bed of the pebbly Paillon? the luxuriant festoons of honeysuckle and mimosa that drape the trellis-work arcades of Carabacel and Cimiez? Who shall describe aright with one pen the gnarled olives of Beaulieu and the palace-like front of the Cercle de la Méditerranée? Who shall write with equal truth of the jewelers’ shops on the quays, of the oriental bazaars of the Avenue, and of the dome after dome of bare mountain tops that rise ever in long perspective to the brilliant white summits of the great Alpine backbone? Who shall tell in one breath of the carmagnoles of the Carnival, or the dust-begrimed bouquets of the Battle of Flowers, and of the silent summits of the Mont Cau and the Cime de Vinaigrier, or the vast and varied sea-view that bursts on the soul unawares from the Corniche near Eza? There are aspects of Nice and its environs which recall Bartholomew Fair, or the Champs Élysées after a Sunday review; and there are aspects which recall the prospect from some solemn summit of the Bernese Oberland, mixed with some heather-clad hill overlooking the green Atlantic among the Western Highlands. Yet all is so graciously touched and lighted with Mediterranean color and Mediterranean sunshine, that even in the midst of her wildest frolics you can seldom be seriously angry with Nice. The works of God’s hand are never far off. You look up from the crowd of carriages and loungers on the Promenade des Anglais, and the Cap Ferrat rises bold and bluff before your eyes above the dashing white waves of the sky-blue sea: you cross the bridge behind the Casino amid the murmur of the quays, and the great bald mountains soar aloft to heaven above the brawling valley of the snow-fed Paillon. It is a desecration, perhaps, but a desecration that leaves you still face to face with all that is purest and most beautiful in nature.

And then, the flowers, the waves, the soft air, the sunshine! On the beach, between the bathing places, men are drying scented orange peel to manufacture perfumes: in the dusty high roads you catch whiffs as you pass of lemon blossom and gardenia: the very trade of the town is an expert trade in golden acacia and crimson anemones: the very gamins pelt you in the rough horse-play of the Carnival with sweet-smelling bunches of syringa and lilac. Luxury that elsewhere would move one to righteous wrath is here so democratic in its display that one almost condones it. The gleaming white villas, with carved caryatides or sculptured porches of freestone nymphs, let the wayfarer revel as he goes in the riches of their shrubberies or their sunlit fountains and in the breezes that blow over their perfumed parterres. Nice vulgar! Pah, my friend, if you say so, I know well why. You have a vulgar soul that sees only the gewgaws and the painted ladies. You have never strolled up by yourself from the noise and dust of the crowded town to the free heights of the Mont Alban or the flowery olive-grounds of the Magnan valley. You have never hunted for purple hellebore among the gorges of the Paillon or picked orchids and irises in big handfuls upon the slopes of Saint André. I doubt even whether you have once turned aside for a moment from the gay crowd of the Casino and the Place Masséna into the narrow streets of the Italian town; communed in their own delicious dialect with the free fisherfolk of the Limpia quarter; or looked out with joy upon the tumbled plain of mountain heights from the breezy level of the Castle platform. Probably you have only sat for days in the balcony of your hotel, rolled at your ease down the afternoon Promenade, worn a false nose at the evening parade of the Carnival, or returned late at night by the last train from Monte Carlo with your pocket much lighter and your heart much heavier than when you left by the morning express in search of fortune. And then you say Nice is vulgar! You have no eyes, it seems, for sea, or shore, or sky, or mountain; but you look down curiously at the dust in the street, and you mutter to yourself that you find it uninteresting. When you go to Nice again, walk alone up the hills to Falicon, returning by Le Ray, and then say, if you dare, Nice is anything on earth but gloriously beautiful.

VII

THE RIVIERA

In the days of the Doges – Origin of the name – The blue bay of Cannes – Ste. Marguerite and St. Honorat – Historical associations – The Rue L’Antibes – The rock of Monaco – “Notre Dame de la Roulette” – From Monte Carlo to Mentone – San Remo – A romantic railway.

“Oh, Land of Roses, what bulbul shall sing of thee?” In plain prose, how describe the garden of Europe? The Riviera! Who knows, save he who has been there, the vague sense of delight which the very name recalls to the poor winter exile, banished by frost and cold from the fogs and bronchitis of more northern climes? What visions of gray olives, shimmering silvery in the breeze on terraced mountain slopes! What cataracts of Marshal Niels, falling in rich profusion over gray limestone walls! What aloes and cactuses on what sun-smitten rocks! What picnics in December beneath what cloudless blue skies! But to those who know and appreciate it best, the Riviera is something more than mere scenery and sunshine. It is life, it is health, it is strength, it is rejuvenescence. The return to it in autumn is as the renewal of youth. Its very faults are dear to us, for they are the defects of its virtues. We can put up with its dust when we remember that dust means sun and dry air; we can forgive its staring white roads when we reflect to ourselves that they depend upon almost unfailing fine weather and bright, clear skies, when northern Europe is wrapped in fog and cold and wretchedness.

And what is this Riviera that we feeble folk who “winter in the south” know and adore so well? Has everybody been there, or may one venture even now to paint it in words once more for the twentieth time? Well, after all, how narrow is our conception of “everybody!” I suppose one out of every thousand at a moderate estimate, has visited that smiling coast that spreads its entrancing bays between Marseilles and Genoa; my description is, therefore, primarily for the nine hundred and ninety-nine who have not been there. And even the thousandth himself, if he knows his Cannes and his Mentone well, will not grudge me a reminiscence of those delicious gulfs and those charming headlands that must be indelibly photographed on his memory.

The name Riviera is now practically English. But in origin it is Genoese. To those seafaring folk, in the days of the Doges, the coasts to east and west of their own princely city were known, naturally enough, as the Riviera di Levante and the Riviera di Ponente respectively, the shores of the rising and the setting sun. But on English lips the qualifying clause “di Ponente” has gradually in usage dropped out altogether, and we speak nowadays of this favored winter resort, by a somewhat illogical clipping, simply as “the Riviera.” In our modern and specially English sense, then, the Riviera means the long and fertile strip of coast between the arid mountains and the Ligurian Sea, beginning at St. Raphael and ending at Genoa. Hyères, it is true, is commonly reckoned of late among Riviera towns, but by courtesy only. It lies, strictly speaking, outside the charmed circle. One may say that the Riviera, properly so called, has its origin where the Estérel abuts upon the Gulf of Fréjus, and extends as far as the outliers of the Alps skirt the Italian shore of the Mediterranean.

Now, the Riviera is just the point where the greatest central mountain system of all Europe topples over most directly into the warmest sea. And its best-known resorts, Nice, Monte Carlo, Mentone, occupy the precise place where the very axis of the ridge abuts at last on the shallow and basking Mediterranean. They are therefore as favorably situated with regard to the mountain wall as Pallanza or Riva, with the further advantage of a more southern position and of a neighboring extent of sunny sea to warm them. The Maritime Alps cut off all northerly winds; while the hot air of the desert, tempered by passing over a wide expanse of Mediterranean waves, arrives on the coast as a delicious breeze, no longer dry and relaxing, but at once genial and refreshing. Add to these varied advantages the dryness of climate due to an essentially continental position (for the Mediterranean is after all a mere inland salt lake), and it is no wonder we all swear by the Riviera as the fairest and most pleasant of winter resorts. My own opinion remains always unshaken, that Antibes, for climate, may fairly claim to rank as the best spot in Europe or round the shores of the Mediterranean.

Not that I am by any means a bigoted Antipolitan. I have tried every other nook and cranny along that delightful coast, from Carqueyranne to Cornigliano, and I will allow that every one of them has for certain purposes its own special advantages. All, all are charming. Indeed, the Riviera is to my mind one long feast of delights. From the moment the railway strikes the sea near Fréjus the traveller feels he can only do justice to the scenery on either side by looking both ways at once, and so “contracting a squint,” like a sausage-seller in Aristophanes. Those glorious peaks of the Estérel alone would encourage the most prosaic to “drop into poetry,” as readily as Mr. Silas Wegg himself in the mansion of the Boffins. How am I to describe them, those rearing masses of rock, huge tors of red porphyry, rising sheer into the air with their roseate crags from a deep green base of Mediterranean pinewood? When the sun strikes their sides, they glow like fire. There they lie in their beauty, like a huge rock pushed out into the sea, the advance-guard of the Alps, unbroken save by the one high-road that runs boldly through their unpeopled midst, and by the timider railway that, fearing to tunnel their solid porphyry depths, winds cautiously round their base by the craggy sea-shore, and so gives us as we pass endless lovely glimpses into sapphire bays with red cliffs and rocky lighthouse-crowned islets. On the whole, I consider the Estérel, as scenery alone, the loveliest “bit” on the whole Riviera; though wanting in human additions, as nature it is the best, the most varied in outline, the most vivid in coloring.

Turning the corner by Agay, you come suddenly, all unawares, on the blue bay of Cannes, or rather on the Golfe de la Napoule, whose very name betrays unintentionally the intense newness and unexpectedness of all this populous coast, this “little England beyond France” that has grown up apace round Lord Brougham’s villa on the shore by the mouth of the Siagne. For when the bay beside the Estérel received its present name, La Napoule, not Cannes, was still the principal village on its bank. Nowadays, people drive over on a spare afternoon from the crowded fashionable town to the slumbrous little hamlet; but in older days La Napoule was a busy local market when Cannes was nothing more than a petty hamlet of Provençal fishermen.

The Golfe de la Napoule ends at the Croisette of Cannes, a long, low promontory carried out into the sea by a submarine bank, whose farthest points re-emerge as the two Iles Lérins, Ste. Marguerite and St. Honorat. Their names are famous in history. A little steamer plies from Cannes to “the Islands,” as everybody calls them locally; and the trip, in calm weather, if the Alps are pleased to shine out, is a pleasant and instructive one. Ste. Marguerite lies somewhat the nearer of the two, a pretty little islet, covered with a thick growth of maritime pines, and celebrated as the prison of that mysterious being, the Man with the Iron Mask, who has given rise to so much foolish and fruitless speculation. Near the landing-place stands the Fort, perched on a high cliff and looking across to the Croisette. Uninteresting in itself, this old fortification is much visited by wonder-loving tourists for the sake of its famous prisoner, whose memory still haunts the narrow terrace corridor, where he paced up and down for seventeen years of unrelieved captivity.

St. Honorat stands farther out to sea than its sister island, and, though lower and flatter, is in some ways more picturesque, in virtue of its massive mediæval monastery and its historical associations. In the early middle ages, when communications were still largely carried on by water, the convent of the Iles Lérins enjoyed much reputation as a favorite stopping-place, one might almost say hotel, for pilgrims to or from Rome; and most of the early British Christians in their continental wanderings found shelter at one time or another under its hospitable roof. St. Augustine stopped here on his way to Canterbury; St. Patrick took the convent on his road from Ireland; Salvian wrote within its walls his dismal jeremiad; Vincent de Lérins composed in it his “Pilgrim’s Guide.” The somber vaults of the ancient cloister still bear witness by their astonishingly thick and solid masonry to their double use as monastery and as place of refuge from the “Saracens,” the Barbary corsairs of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. Indeed, Paynim fleets plundered the place more than once, and massacred the monks in cold blood.

Of Cannes itself, marvelous product of this gad-about and commercial age, how shall the truthful chronicler speak with becoming respect and becoming dignity? For Cannes has its faults. Truly a wonderful place is that cosmopolitan winter resort. Rococo châteaux, glorious gardens of palm-trees, imitation Moorish villas, wooden châlets from the scene-painter’s ideal Switzerland, Elizabethan mansions stuck in Italian grounds, lovely groves of mimosa, eucalyptus, and judas-trees, all mingle together in so strange and incongruous a picture that one knows not when to laugh, when to weep, when to admire, when to cry “Out on it!” Imagine a conglomeration of two or three white-faced Parisian streets, interspersed with little bits of England, of Brussels, of Algiers, of Constantinople, of Pekin, of Bern, of Nuremberg and of Venice, jumbled side by side on a green Provençal hillside before a beautiful bay, and you get modern Cannes; a Babel set in Paradise; a sort of boulevardier Bond Street, with a view across blue waves to the serrated peaks of the ever lovely Estérel. Nay; try as it will, Cannes cannot help being beautiful. Nature has done so much for it that art itself, the debased French art of the Empire and the Republic, can never for one moment succeed in making it ugly; though I am bound to admit it has striven as hard as it knew for that laudable object. But Cannes is Cannes still, in spite of Grand Dukes and landscape gardeners and architects. And the Old Town, at least, is yet wholly unspoilt by the speculative builder. Almost every Riviera watering-place has such an old-world nucleus or kernel of its own, the quaint fisher village of ancient days, round which the meretricious modern villas have clustered, one by one, in irregular succession. At Cannes the Old Town is even more conspicuous than elsewhere; for it clambers up the steep sides of a little seaward hillock, crowned by the tower of an eleventh century church, and is as picturesque, as gray, as dirty, as most other haunts of the hardy Provençal fisherman. Strange, too, to see how the two streams of life flow on ever, side by side, yet ever unmingled. The Cannes of the fishermen is to this day as unvaried as if the new cosmopolitan winter resort had never grown up, with its Anglo-Russian airs and graces, its German-American frivolities, round that unpromising center.

The Rue d’Antibes is the principal shopping street of the newer and richer Cannes. If we follow it out into the country by its straight French boulevard it leads us at last to the funny old border city from which it still takes its unpretending name. Antibes itself belongs to that very first crop of civilized Provençal towns which owe their origin to the sturdy old Phocæan colonists. It is a Greek city by descent, the Antipolis which faced and defended the harbor of Nicæa; and for picturesqueness and beauty it has not its equal on the whole picturesque and beautiful Riviera. Everybody who has travelled by the “Paris, Lyon, Méditerranée” knows well the exquisite view of the mole and harbor as seen in passing from the railway. But that charming glimpse, quaint and varied as it is, gives by no means a full idea of the ancient Phocæan city. The town stands still surrounded by its bristling fortification, the work of Vauban, pierced by narrow gates in their thickness, and topped with noble ramparts. The Fort Carré that crowns the seaward promontory, the rocky islets, and the two stone breakwaters of the port (a small-scale Genoa), all add to the striking effect of the situation and prospect. Within, the place is as quaint and curious as without: a labyrinth of narrow streets, poor in memorials of Antipolis, but rich in Roman remains, including that famous and pathetic inscription to the boy Septentrio, QVI ANTIPOLI IN THEATRO BIDVO SALTAVIT ET PLACVIT. The last three words borrowed from this provincial tombstone, have become proverbial of the short-lived glory of the actor’s art.

The general aspect of Antibes town, however, is at present mediæval, or even seventeenth century. A flavor as of Louis Quatorz pervades the whole city, with its obtrusive military air of a border fortress; for, of course, while the Var still formed the frontier between France and Italy, Antibes ranked necessarily as a strategic post of immense importance; and at the present day, in our new recrudescence of military barbarism, great barracks surround the fortifications with fresh white-washed walls, and the “Hun! Deusse!” of the noisy French drill-sergeant resounds all day long from the exercise-ground by the railway station. Antibes itself is therefore by no means a place to stop at; it is the Cap d’Antibes close by that attracts now every year an increasing influx of peaceful and cultivated visitors. The walks and drives are charming; the pine-woods, carpeted with wild anemones, are a dream of delight; and the view from the Lighthouse Hill behind the town is one of the loveliest and most varied on the whole round Mediterranean.

But I must not linger here over the beauties of the Cap d’Antibes, but must be pushing onwards towards Monaco and Monte Carlo.

It is a wonderful spot, this little principality of Monaco, hemmed in between the high mountains and the assailing sea, and long hermetically cut off from all its more powerful and commercial neighbors. Between the palm-lined boulevards of Nice and the grand amphitheater of mountains that shuts in Mentone as with a perfect semicircle of rearing peaks, one rugged buttress, the last long subsiding spur of the great Alpine axis, runs boldly out to seaward, and ends in the bluff rocky headland of the Tête de Chien that overhangs Monte Carlo. Till very lately no road ever succeeded in turning the foot of that precipitous promontory: the famous Corniche route runs along a ledge high up its beetling side, past the massive Roman ruin of Turbia, and looks down from a height of fifteen hundred feet upon the palace of Monaco. This mountain bulwark of the Turbia long formed the real boundary line between ancient Gaul and Liguria; and on its very summit, where the narrow Roman road wound along the steep pass now widened into the magnificent highway of the Corniche, Augustus built a solid square monument to mark the limit between the Province and the Italian soil, as well as to overawe the mountaineers of this turbulent region. A round mediæval tower, at present likewise in ruins, crowns the Roman work. Here the Alps end abruptly. The rock of Monaco at the base is their last ineffectual seaward protest.

And what a rock it is, that quaint ridge of land, crowned by the strange capital of that miniature principality! Figure to yourself a huge whale petrified, as he basks there on the shoals his back rising some two hundred feet from the water’s edge, his head to the sea, and his tail just touching the mainland, and you have a rough mental picture of the Rock of Monaco. It is, in fact, an isolated hillock, jutting into the Mediterranean at the foot of the Maritime Alps (a final reminder, as it were, of their dying dignity), and united to the Undercliff only by a narrow isthmus at the foot of the crag which bears the mediæval bastions of the Prince’s palace. As you look down on it from above from the heights of the Corniche, I have no hesitation in saying it forms the most picturesque town site in all Europe. On every side, save seaward, huge mountains gird it round; while towards the smiling blue Mediterranean itself the great rock runs outward, bathed by tiny white breakers in every part, except where the low isthmus links it to the shore; and with a good field-glass you can see down in a bird’s eye view into every street and courtyard of the clean little capital. The red-tiled houses, the white palace with its orderly gardens and quadrangles, the round lunettes of the old wall, the steep cobbled mule-path which mounts the rock from the modern railway-station, all lie spread out before one like a pictorial map, painted in the bright blue of Mediterranean seas, the dazzling gray of Mediterranean sunshine, and the brilliant russet of Mediterranean roofs.

There can be no question at all that Monte Carlo even now, with all its gew-gaw additions, is very beautiful: no Haussmann could spoil so much loveliness of position; and even the new town itself, which grows apace each time I revisit it, has a picturesqueness of hardy arch, bold rock, well-perched villa, which redeems it to a great extent from any rash charge of common vulgarity. All looks like a scene in a theater, not like a prosaic bit of this work-a-day world of ours. Around us is the blue Mediterranean, broken into a hundred petty sapphire bays. Back of us rise tier after tier of Maritime Alps, their huge summits clouded in a fleecy mist. To the left stands the white rock of Monaco; to the right, the green Italian shore, fading away into the purple mountains that guard the Gulf of Genoa. Lovely by nature, the immediate neighborhood of the Casino has been made in some ways still more lovely by art. From the water’s edge, terraces of tropical vegetation succeed one another in gradual steps towards the grand façade of the gambling-house; clusters of palms and aloes, their base girt by exotic flowers, are thrust cunningly into the foreground of every point in the view, so that you see the bay and the mountains through the artistic vistas thus deftly arranged in the very spots where a painter’s fancy would have set them. You look across to Monaco past a clump of drooping date-branches; you catch a glimpse of Bordighera through a framework of spreading dracænas and quaintly symmetrical fan-palms.

Once more under way, and this time on foot. For the road from Monte Carlo to Mentone is almost as lovely in its way as that from Nice to Monte Carlo. It runs at first among the ever-increasing villas and hotels of the capital of Chance, and past that sumptuous church, built from the gains of the table, which native wit has not inaptly christened “Nôtre Dame de la Roulette.” There is one point of view of Monaco and its bay, on the slopes of the Cap Martin, not far from Roquebrune, so beautiful that though I have seen it, I suppose, a hundred times or more, I can never come upon it to this day without giving vent to an involuntary cry of surprise and admiration.

Roquebrune itself, which was an Italian Roccabruna when I first knew it, has a quaint situation of its own, and a quaint story connected with it. Brown as its own rocks, the tumbled little village stands oddly jumbled in and out among huge masses of pudding-stone, which must have fallen at some time or other in headlong confusion from the scarred face of the neighboring hillside. From the Corniche road it is still quite easy to recognize the bare patch on the mountain slope whence the landslip detached itself, and to trace its path down the hill to its existing position. But local legend goes a little farther than that: it asks us to believe that the rock fell as we see it with the houses on top; in other words, that the village was built before the catastrophe took place, and that it glided down piecemeal into the tossed-about form it at present presents to us. Be this as it may, and the story makes some demand on the hearer’s credulity, it is certain that the houses now occupy most picturesque positions: here perched by twos and threes on broken masses of conglomerate, there wedged in between two great walls of beetling cliff, and yonder again hanging for dear life to some slender foothold on the precipitous hillside.

We reach the summit of the pass. The Bay of Monaco is separated from the Bay of Mentone by the long, low-headland of Cap Martin, covered with olive groves and scrubby maritime pines. As one turns the corner from Roquebrune by the col round the cliff, there bursts suddenly upon the view one of the loveliest prospects to be beheld from the Corniche. At our feet, embowered among green lemons and orange trees, Mentone half hides itself behind its villas and its gardens. In the middle distance the old church with its tall Italian campanile stands out against the blue peaks of that magnificent amphitheater. Beyond, again, a narrow gorge marks the site of the Pont St. Louis and the Italian frontier. Farther eastward the red rocks merge half indistinctly into the point of La Mortola, with Mr. Hanbury’s famous garden; then come the cliffs and fortifications of Ventimiglia, gleaming white in the sun; and last of all, the purple hills that hem in San Remo. It is an appropriate approach to a most lovely spot; for Mentone ranks high for beauty, even among her bevy of fair sisters on the Ligurian sea-board.

Yes, Mentone is beautiful, most undeniably beautiful; and for walks and drives perhaps it may bear away the palm from all rivals on that enchanted and enchanting Riviera. Five separate valleys, each carved out by its own torrent, with dry winter bed, converge upon the sea within the town precincts. Four principal rocky ridges divide these valleys with their chine-like backbone, besides numberless minor spurs branching laterally inland. Each valley is threaded by a well-made carriage-road, and each dividing ridge is climbed by a bridle-path and footway. The consequence is that the walks and drives at Mentone are never exhausted, and excursions among the hills might occupy the industrious pedestrian for many successive winters. What hills they are, too, those great bare needles and pinnacles of rock, worn into jagged peaks and points by the ceaseless rain of ages, and looking down from their inaccessible tops with glittering scorn upon the green lemon groves beneath them!

The next town on the line, Bordighera, is better known to the world at large as a Rivieran winter resort, though of a milder and quieter type, I do not say than Nice or Cannes, but than Mentone or San Remo. Bordighera, indeed, has just reached that pleasant intermediate stage in the evolution of a Rivieran watering-place when all positive needs of the northern stranger are amply supplied, while crowds and fashionable amusements have not yet begun to invade its primitive simplicity. The walks and drives on every side are charming; the hotels are comfortable, and the prices are still by no means prohibitive.

San Remo comes next in order of the cosmopolitan winter resorts: San Remo, thickly strewn with spectacled Germans, like leaves in Vallombrosa, since the Emperor Frederick chose the place for his last despairing rally. The Teuton finds himself more at home, indeed, across the friendly Italian border than in hostile France; and the St. Gotthard gives him easy access by a pleasant route to these nearer Ligurian towns, so that the Fatherland has now almost annexed San Remo, as England has annexed Cannes, and America Nice and Cimiez. Built in the evil days of the Middle Ages, when every house was a fortress and every breeze bore a Saracen, San Remo presents to-day a picturesque labyrinth of streets, lanes, vaults, and alleys, only to be surpassed in the quaint neighboring village of Taggia. This is the heart of the earthquake region, too; and to protect themselves against that frequent and unwelcome visitor, whose mark may be seen on half the walls in the outskirts, the inhabitants of San Remo have strengthened their houses by a system of arches thrown at varying heights across the tangled paths, which recalls Algiers or Tunis. From certain points of view, and especially from the east side, San Remo thus resembles a huge pyramid of solid masonry, or a monstrous pagoda hewn out by giant hands from a block of white free-stone. As Dickens well worded it, one seems to pass through the town by going perpetually from cellar to cellar. A romantic railway skirts the coast from San Remo to Alassio and Savona. It forms one long succession of tunnels, interspersed with frequent breathing spaces beside lovely bays, “the peacock’s neck in hue,” as the Laureate sings of them. One town after another sweeps gradually into view round the corner of a promontory, a white mass of houses crowning some steep point of rock, of which Alassio alone has as yet any pretensions to be considered a home for northern visitors.

VIII

GENOA

Early history – Old fortifications – The rival of Venice – Changes of twenty-five years – From the parapet of the Corso – The lower town – The Genoese palazzi – Monument to Christopher Columbus – The old Dogana – Memorials in the Campo Santo – The Bay of Spezzia – The Isola Palmeria – Harbor scenes.

Genova la Superba – Genoa the Proud – an epithet not inappropriate for this city of merchant princes of olden days, which was once the emporium of the Tyrrhenian, as was Venice of the Adriatic sea, and the rival of the latter for the commerce of the Eastern Mediterranean. No two cities, adapted to play a similar part in history, could be more unlike in their natural environments: Venice clustered on a series of mud banks, parted by an expanse of water from a low coast-line, beyond which the far-away mountains rise dimly in the distance, a fleet, as it were, of houses anchored in the shallows of the Adriatic; Genoa stretching along the shore by the deepening water, at the very feet of the Apennines, climbing up their slopes, and crowning their lower summits with its watch-towers. No seaport in Italy possesses a site so rich in natural beauty, not even Spezzia in its bay, for though the scenery in the neighborhood certainly surpasses that around Genoa, the town itself is built upon an almost level plain; not even Naples itself, notwithstanding the magnificent sweep of its bay, dominated by the volcanic cone of Vesuvius, and bounded by the limestone crags of the range of Monte S. Angelo. Genoa, however, like all places and persons, has had its detractors. Perhaps of no town has a more bitter sarcasm been uttered, than the well known one, which no doubt originated in the mouth of some envious Tuscan, when the two peoples were contending for the mastery of the western sea, and the maker of the epigram was on the losing side. Familiar as it is to many, we will venture to quote it again, as it may be rendered in our own tongue: “Treeless hills, a fishless sea, faithless men, shameless women.” As to the reproach in the first clause, one must admit there is still some truth; and in olden days, when gardens were fewer and more land was left in its natural condition, there may have been even more point. The hills around Genoa undoubtedly seem a little barren, when compared with those on the Riviera some miles farther to the south, with their extraordinary luxuriance of vegetation, their endless slopes of olives, which only cease to give place to oak and pine and myrtle. There is also, I believe, some truth in the second clause; but as to the rest it is not for a comparative stranger to express an opinion. So far however as the men are concerned the reproach is not novel. Centuries since, Liguria, of which Genoa is the principal town, was noted for the cunning and treacherous disposition of its people, who ethnologically differ considerably from their neighbors. In Virgil’s “Æneid” a Ligurian chief shows more cunning than courage in a fight with an Amazon, and is thus apostrophized before receiving his death-blow from a woman’s hand: “In vain, O shifty one, hast thou tried thy hereditary craft.” The people of this part of Italy form one of a series of ethnological islands; where a remnant, by no means inconsiderable, of an earlier race has survived the invading flood of a stronger people. This old-world race – commonly called the Iberian – is characteristically short in stature, dark in hair, eyes, and complexion. Representatives of it survive in Brittany, Wales, Ireland, the Basque Provinces, and other out-of-the-way corners of Europe; insulated or pressed back, till they could no farther go, by the advance of the Aryan race, by some or other representative of which Europe is now peopled. On the Ligurian coast, however, as might be expected, in the track of two thousand years of commerce and civilization, the races, however different in origin and formerly naturally hostile, have been almost fused together by intermarriage; and this, at any rate in Genoa, seems to have had a fortuitous result in the production of an exceptionally good-looking people, especially in the case of the younger women. I well remember some years since, when driving out on a summer evening on the western side of Genoa, to have passed crowds of women, most of them young, returning from work in the factories, and certainly I never saw so large a proportion of beautiful faces as there were among them.

Genoa for at least two thousand years has been an important center of commerce; though, of course, like most other places, it has not been uniformly prosperous. It fell under the Roman power about two centuries before the Christian era, the possession of it for a time being disputed with the Carthaginians; then it became noted as a seaport town for the commerce of the western part of the Mediterranean, it declined and suffered during the decadence and fall of the Empire, and then gradually rose into eminence during the Middle Ages. Even in the tenth century Genoa was an important community; its citizens, as beseemed men who were hardy sailors, found a natural pleasure in any kind of disturbance; they joined in the Crusades, and turned religious enthusiasm to commercial profit by the acquisition of various towns and islands in the East. The rather unusual combination of warrior and merchant, which the Genoese of the Middle Ages present, is no doubt due not only to social character, but also to exceptional circumstances. “The constant invasions of the Saracens united the professions of trade and war, and its greatest merchants became also its greatest generals, while its naval captains were also merchants.”

Genoa, as may be supposed, had from the first to contend with two formidable rivals: the one being Pisa in its own waters; the other Venice, whose citizens were equally anxious for supremacy in the Levant and the commerce of the East. With both these places the struggle was long and fierce, but the fortune of war on the whole was distinctly favorable to Genoa nearer home, and unfavorable in regard to the more distant foe. Pisa was finally defeated in the neighborhood of Leghorn, and in the year 1300 had to cede to her enemy a considerable amount of territory, including the island of Corsica; while Venice, after more than a century of conflict with very varying fortune, at last succeeded in obtaining the supremacy in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The internal history of the city during all this period was not more peaceful than its external. Genoa presents the picture of a house divided against itself; and, strange to say, falsifies the proverb by prospering instead of perishing. If there were commonly wars without, there were yet more persistent factions within. Guelphs, headed by the families of Grimaldi and Fieschi, and Ghibellines, by those of Spinola and Doria, indulged in faction-fights and sometimes in civil warfare, until at last some approach to peace was procured by the influence of Andrea Doria, who, in obtaining the freedom of the state from French control, brought about the adoption of most important constitutional changes, which tended to obliterate the old and sharply divided party lines. Yet even he narrowly escaped overthrow from a conspiracy, headed by one of the Fieschi; his great-nephew and heir was assassinated, and his ultimate triumph was due rather to a fortunate accident, which removed from the scene the leader of his opponents, than to his personal power. Then the tide of prosperity began to turn against the Genoese. The Turk made himself master of their lands and cities in the East. Venice ousted them from the commerce of the Levant. War arose with France, and the city itself was captured by that power in the year 1684. The following century was far from being a prosperous time for Genoa, and near the close it opened its gates to the Republican troops, a subjugation which ultimately resulted in no little suffering to the inhabitants.

Genoa at that time was encircled on the land side by a double line of fortifications, a considerable portion of which still remains. The outer one, with its associated detached forts, mounted up the inland slopes to an elevation of some hundreds of feet above the sea, and within this is an inner line of much greater antiquity. As it was for those days a place of exceptional strength, its capture became of the first importance, in the great struggle between France and Austria, as a preliminary to driving the Republican troops out of Italy. The city was defended by the French under the command of Massena; it was attacked on the land side by the Imperialist force, while it was blockaded from the sea by the British fleet. After fifteen days of hard fighting among the neighboring Apennines, Massena was finally shut up in the city. No less desperate fighting followed around the walls, until at last the defending force was so weakened by its losses that further aggressive operations became impossible on its part, and the siege was converted into a blockade. The results were famine and pestilence. A hundred thousand persons were cooped up within the walls. “From the commencement of the siege the price of provisions had been extravagantly high, and in its latter days grain of any sort could not be had at any cost… The neighboring rocks within the walls were covered with a famished crowd, seeking, in the vilest animals and the smallest traces of vegetation, the means of assuaging their intolerable pangs… In the general agony, not only leather and skins of every kind were consumed, but the horror at human flesh was so much abated that numbers were supported on the dead bodies of their fellow citizens. Pestilence, as usual, came in the rear of famine, and contagious fevers swept off multitudes, whom the strength of the survivors was unable to inter.” Before the obstinate defense was ended, and Massena, at the end of all his resources, was compelled to capitulate on honorable terms, twenty thousand of the inhabitants had perished from hunger or disease. The end of this terrible struggle brought little profit to the conquerors, for before long the battle of Marengo, and the subsequent successes of Napoleon in Northern Italy, led to the city being again surrendered to the French. It had to endure another siege at the end of Napoleon’s career, for in 1814 it was attacked by English troops under Lord William Bentinck. Fortunately for the inhabitants, the French commander decided to surrender after a few days’ severe struggle around the outer defenses. On the settlement of European affairs which succeeded the final fall of Napoleon, Genoa was annexed to the kingdom of Sardinia, and now forms part of united Italy; though, it is said, the old instincts of the people give them a theoretic preference for a republican form of government.

Genoa, like so many of the chief Italian towns, has been greatly altered during the last twenty-five years. Its harbors have been much enlarged; its defenses have been extended far beyond their ancient limits. Down by the water-side, among the narrow streets on the shelving ground that fringes the sea, we are still in old Genoa – the city of the merchant princes of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; but higher up the slopes a new town has sprung up, with broad streets and fine modern houses, and a “corso,” bordered by trees and mansions, still retains in its zigzag outline the trace of the old fortifications which enclosed the arm of Massena. More than one spot, on or near this elevated road, commands a splendid outlook over the city and neighborhood.

From such a position the natural advantages of the site of Genoa, the geographical conditions which have almost inevitably determined its history, can be apprehended at a glance. Behind us rise steeply, as has been already said, the hills forming the southernmost zone of the Apennines. This, no doubt, is a defect in a military point of view, because the city is commanded by so many positions of greater elevation; but this defect was less serious in ancient days, when the range of ordnance was comparatively short; while the difficulty of access which these positions presented, and the obstacles which the mountain barrier of the Apennines offered to the advance of an enemy from the comparatively distant plains of Piedmont, rendered the city far more secure than it may at first sight have appeared. Beneath us lies a deeply recessed bay, in outline like the half of an egg, guarded on the east by a projecting shoulder; while on the western side hills descend, at first rapidly, then more gently, to a point which projects yet farther to the south. This eastern shoulder is converted into a kind of peninsula, rudely triangular in shape, by the valley of the Bisagno, a stream of considerable size which thus forms a natural moat for the fortifications on the eastern side of the town. In a bay thus sheltered on three sides by land, vessels were perfectly safe from most of the prevalent winds; and it was only necessary to carry out moles from the western headland and from some point on the eastern shore, to protect them also from storms which might blow from the south. The first defense was run out from the latter side, and still bears the name of the Molo Vecchio; then the port was enlarged, by carrying out another mole from the end of the western headland; this has been greatly extended, so that the town may now be said to possess an inner and an outer harbor. From the parapet of the Corso these topographical facts are seen at a glance, as we look over the tall and densely-massed houses to the busy quays, and the ships which are moored alongside. Such a scene cannot fail to be attractive, and the lighthouse, rising high above the western headland, is less monotonous in outline than is usual with such buildings, and greatly enhances the effect of the picture. The city, however, when regarded from this elevated position is rather wanting in variety. We look down over a crowded mass of lofty houses, from which, indeed, two or three domes or towers rise up; but there is not enough diversity in the design of the one, or a sufficiently marked pre-eminence in the others, to afford a prospect which is comparable with that of many other ancient cities. Still some variety is given by the trees, which here and there, especially towards the eastern promontory, are interspersed among the houses; while the Ligurian coast on the one hand, and the distant summits of the Maritime Alps on the other, add to the scene a never-failing charm.

Of the newer part of the town little more need be said. It is like the most modern part of any Continental city, and only differs from the majority of these by the natural steepness and irregularity of the site. In Genoa, except for a narrow space along the shore, one can hardly find a plot of level ground. Now that the old limits of the enceinte have been passed, it is still growing upwards; but beyond and above the farthest houses the hills are still crowned by fortresses, keeping watch and ward over the merchant city. These, of course, are of modern date; but some of them have been reconstructed on the ancient sites, and still encrust, as can be seen at a glance, towers and walls which did their duty in the olden times. For a season, indeed, there was more to be protected than merchandise, for, till lately, Genoa was the principal arsenal of the Italian kingdom; but this has now been removed to Spezzia. Italy, however, does not seem to feel much confidence in that immunity from plunder which has been sometimes accorded to “open towns,” or in the platitudes of peace-mongers; and appears to take ample precautions that an enemy in command of the sea shall not thrust his hand into a full purse without a good chance of getting nothing better than crushed fingers.

But in the lower town we are still in the Genoa of the olden time. There is not, indeed, very much to recall the city of the more strictly mediæval epoch; though two churches date from days before the so-called “Renaissance,” and are good examples of its work. Most of what we now see belongs to the Genoa of the sixteenth century; or, at any rate, is but little anterior in age to this. The lower town, however, even where its buildings are comparatively modern, still retains in plan – in its narrow, sometimes irregular, streets; in its yet narrower alleys, leading by flights of steps up the steep hill side; in its crowded, lofty houses; in its “huddled up” aspect, for perhaps no single term can better express our meaning – the characteristics of an ancient Italian town. In its streets even the summer sun – let the proverb concerning the absence of the sun and the presence of the doctor say what it may – can seldom scorch, and the bitter north wind loses its force among the maze of buildings. Open spaces of any kind are rare; the streets, in consequence of their narrowness, are unusually thronged, and thus produce the idea of a teeming population; which, indeed, owing to the general loftiness of the houses, is large in proportion to the area. They are accordingly ill-adapted for the requirements of modern traffic.

Genoa, like Venice, is noted for its palazzi– for the sumptuous dwellings inhabited by the burgher aristocracy of earlier days, which are still, in not a few cases, in possession of their descendants. But in style and in position nothing can be more different. We do not refer to the obvious distinction that in the one city the highway is water, in the other it is dry land; or to the fact that buildings in the so-called Gothic style are common in Venice, but are not to be found among the mansions of Genoa. It is rather to this, that the Via Nuova, which in this respect holds the same place in Genoa as the Grand Canal does in Venice, is such a complete contrast to it, that they must be compared by their opposites. The latter is a broad and magnificent highway, affording a full view and a comprehensive survey of the stately buildings which rise from its margin. The former is a narrow street, corresponding in dimensions with one of the less important among the side canals in the other city. It is thus almost impossible to obtain any good idea of the façade of the Genoese palazzi. The passing traveller has about as much chance of doing this as he would have of studying the architecture of Mincing Lane; and even if he could discover a quiet time, like Sunday morning in the City, he would still have to strain his neck by staring upwards at the overhanging mass of masonry, and find a complete view of any one building almost impossible. But so far as these palazzi can be seen, how far do they repay examination? It is a common-place with travellers to expatiate on the magnificence of the Via Nuova, and one or two other streets in Genoa. There is an imposing magniloquence in the word palazzo, and a “street of palaces” is a formula which impels many minds to render instant homage.

But, speaking for myself, I must own to being no great admirer of this part of Genoa; to me the design of these palazzi appears often heavy and oppressive. They are sumptuous rather than dignified, and impress one more with the length of the purse at the architect’s command than with the quality of his genius or the fecundity of his conceptions. No doubt there are some fine buildings – the Palazzo Spinola, the Palazzo Doria Tursi, the Palazzo del’ Universita, and the Palazzo Balbi, are among those most generally praised. But if I must tell the plain, unvarnished truth, I never felt and never shall feel much enthusiasm for the “city of palaces.” It has been some relief to me to find that I am not alone in this heresy, as it will appear to some. For on turning to the pages of Fergusson,[1 - History of Modern Architecture.] immediately after penning the above confession, I read for the first time the following passage (and it must be admitted that, though not free from occasional “cranks” as to archæological questions, he was a critic of extensive knowledge and no mean authority): – “When Venice adopted the Renaissance style, she used it with an aristocratic elegance that relieves even its most fantastic forms in the worst age. In Genoa there is a pretentious parvenu vulgarity, which offends in spite of considerable architectural merit. Their size, their grandeur, and their grouping may force us to admire the palaces of Genoa; but for real beauty or architectural propriety of design they will not stand a moment’s comparison with the contemporary or earlier palaces of Florence, Rome, or Venice.” Farther on he adds very truly, after glancing at the rather illegitimate device by which the façades have been rendered more effective by the use of paint, instead of natural color in the materials employed, as in the older buildings of Venice, he adds: – “By far the most beautiful feature of the greater palaces of Genoa is their courtyards” (a feature obviously which can only make its full appeal to a comparatively limited number of visitors), “though these, architecturally, consist of nothing but ranges of arcades, resting on attenuated Doric pillars. These are generally of marble, sometimes grouped in pairs, and too frequently with a block of an entablature over each, under the springing of the arch; but notwithstanding these defects, a cloistered court is always and inevitably pleasing, and if combined with gardens and scenery beyond, which is generally the case in this city, the effect, as seen from the streets, is so poetic as to disarm criticism. All that dare be said is that, beautiful as they are, with a little more taste and judgment they might have been ten times more so than they are now.”