The Campo Santo Of Genoa Is A Mortuary Gloss Of Genoese History:
Of the
long succession of civic strifes and foreign wars common to all the
Italian republics, now pacified at last by a spirit of unity, of
brotherhood.
At Genoa, more than anywhere else in Italy except Milan,
you are aware of the North - its strenu-ousness, its enterprise, its
restless outstretching for worlds beyond itself. Columbus came with the
gift of a New World in his hand, and, in the fulness of time, Mazzini
came with the gift of a Newer World in his hand: the realization of
Christ in the ideal of duties without which the old ideal of rights is
heathen and helpless. Against the rude force of Genoa, the aristocratic
beauty of such a place as Pisa was nothing; only Florence and Venice
might vie with her. But she had not the inspiration of Florence, her
art, her literature; the dialect in which she uttered herself is harsh
and crabbed, and no poet known beyond it has breathed his soul into it;
her architecture was first the Gothic from over the Alps, and then of
the Renaissance which built the palaces of her merchants in a giant bulk
and of a brutal grandeur. She had not the political genius of Venice,
the oligarchic instinct of self-preservation from popular misgovernment
and princely aggression. Her story is the usual Italian story of a
people jealous of each other, and, in their fear of a native tyrant,
impatiently calling in one foreign tyrant after another and then
furiously expelling him.
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