We Were Some Time In Finding Our Way Into The Magnificent Hall Of The Great Council Where This Statue Once Stood, With The Statues Of Many Other Genoese Heroes And Statesmen, And I Am Not Sure That It Was Worth All Our Trouble.

Magnificent it certainly was, but coarsely magnificent, like so much elsewhere in Genoa; but, if we had been at ten times the trouble we were in seeing the Palace of the Municipality, I should not think it too much.

There in the great hall are the monuments of those Genoese notables whose munificence their country wished to remember in the order of their generosity. I do not remember just what the maximum was, but the Doge or other leading citizen who gave, say, twenty-five thousand ducats to the state had a statue erected to him; one who gave fifteen, a bust; and one who gave five, an honorary tablet. The surprising thing is that nearly all the statues and busts, whether good likenesses or not, are delightful art: it is as if the noble acts of the benefactors of their country had inspired the sculptors to reproduce them not only in true character, but in due dignity. To the American who views them and remembers that we have now so much money that some of us do not know what to do with it, they will suggest that our millionaires have an unrivalled opportunity of immortality in the same sort. There is hardly a town of ten thousand inhabitants in the country where there are not men who could easily afford to give a hundred thousand dollars, or fifty, or twenty to their native or adoptive place and so enter upon a new life in bronze or marble.

Enter page number Go  Previous Next
Page 328 of 353
Words from 90141 to 90432 of 97259