The Home In Genoa - 2

The Home In Genoa - 2

There is one fragment of fact about this Domenico that greatly enlarges our knowledge of

him. He was a wool-weaver, as we know; he also kept a tavern, and no doubt justified the

adventure on the plea that it would bring him customers for his woollen cloth; for your

buyer and seller never lacks a reason either for his selling or buying. Presently he is

buying again; this time, still with striking of legal attitudes, calling together of relations,

and accompaniments of crabbed Latin notarial documents, a piece of ground in the

suburbs of Genoa, consisting of scrub and undergrowth, which cannot have been of any

earthly use to him. But also, according to the documents, there went some old wine-vats

with the land. Domenico, taking a walk after Mass on some feast-day, sees the land and

the wine-vats; thinks dimly but hopefully how old wine-vats, if of no use to any other

human creature, should at least be of use to a tavern-keeper; hurries back, overpowers the

perfunctory objections of his complaisant wife, and on the morrow of the feast is off to

the notary's office. We may be sure the wine-vats lay and rotted there, and furnished no

monetary profit to the wool-weaving tavern-keeper; but doubtless they furnished him a

rich profit of another kind when he walked about his newly-acquired property, and

explained what he was going to do with the wine-vats.

And besides the weaving of wool and pouring of wine and buying and selling of land,

there were more human occupations, which Domenico was not the man to neglect. He

had married, about the year 1450, one Susanna, a daughter of Giacomo of Fontana-Rossa,

a silk weaver who lived in the hamlet near to Terra-Rossa. Domenico's father was of the

more consequence of the two, for he had, as well as his home in the valley, a house at

Quinto, where he probably kept a felucca for purposes of trade with Alexandria and the

Islands. Perhaps the young people were married at Quinto, but if so they did not live there

long, moving soon into Genoa, where Domenico could more conveniently work at his

trade. The wool-weavers at that time lived in a quarter outside the old city walls, between

them and the outer borders of the city, which is now occupied by the park and public

gardens. Here they had their dwellings and workshops, their schools and institutions,

receiving every protection and encouragement from the Signoria, who recognised the

importance of the wool trade and its allied industries to Genoa. Cloth-weavers, blanketmakers,

silk-weavers, and velvet-makers all lived in this quarter, and held their houses

under the neighbouring abbey of San Stefano. There are two houses mentioned in

documents which seem to have been in the possession of Domenico at different times.

One was in the suburbs outside the Olive Gate; the other was farther in, by St. Andrew's

Gate, and quite near to the sea. The house outside the Olive Gate has disappeared; and it

was probably here that our Christopher first saw the light, and pleased Domenico's heart

with his little cries and struggles. Neither the day nor even the year is certainly known,

but there is most reason to believe that it was in the year 1451. They must have moved

soon afterwards to the house in the Vico Dritto di Ponticello, No. 37, in which most of

Christopher's childhood was certainly passed. This is a house close to St. Andrew's Gate,

which gate still stands in a beautiful and ruinous condition.

From the new part of Genoa, and from the Via XX Settembre, you turn into the little

Piazza di Ponticello just opposite the church of San Stefano. In a moment you are in old

Genoa, which is to-day in appearance virtually the same as the place in which

Christopher and his little brothers and sisters made the first steps of their pilgrimage

through this world. If the Italian, sun has been shining fiercely upon you, in the great

modern thoroughfare, you will turn into this quarter of narrow streets and high houses

with grateful relief. The past seems to meet you there; and from the Piazza, gay with its

little provision-shops and fruit stalls, you walk up the slope of the Vico Dritto di

Ponticello, leaving the sunlight behind you, and entering the narrow street like a traveller

entering a mountain gorge.

It is a very curious street this; I suppose there is no street in the world that has more

character. Genoa invented sky-scrapers long before Columbus had discovered America,

or America had invented steel frames for high building; but although many of the houses

in the Vico Dritto di Ponticello are seven and eight storeys high, the width of the street

from house-wall to house-wall does not average more than nine feet. The street is not

straight, moreover; it winds a little in its ascent to the old city wall and St. Andrew's

Gate, so that you do not even see the sky much as you look forward and upwards. The

jutting cornices of the roofs, often beautifully decorated, come together in a medley of

angles and corners that practically roof the street over; and only here and there do you see

a triangle or a parallelogram of the vivid brilliant blue that is the sky. Besides being seven

or eight storeys high, the houses are the narrowest in the world; I should think that their

average width on the street front is ten feet. So as you walk up this street where young

Christopher lived you must think of it in these three dimensions towering slices of

houses, ten or twelve feet in width: a street often not more than eight and seldom more

than fifteen feet in width; and the walls of the houses themselves, painted in every colour,

green and pink and grey and white, and trellised with the inevitable green windowshutters

of the South, standing like cliffs on each side of you seven or eight rooms high.

There being so little horizontal space for the people to live there, what little there is is

most economically used; and all across the tops of the houses, high above your head, the

cliffs are joined by wires and clothes-lines from which thousands of brightly-dyed

garments are always hanging and fluttering; higher still, where the top storeys of the

houses become merged in roof, there are little patches of garden and greenery, where

geraniums and delicious tangling creepers uphold thus high above the ground the fertile

tradition of earth. You walk slowly up the paved street. One of its characteristics, which it

shares with the old streets of most Italian towns, is that it is only used by foot-passengers,

being of course too narrow for wheels; and it is paved across with flagstones from door to

door, so that the feet and the voices echo pleasantly in it, and make a music of their own.

Without exception the ground floor of every house is a shop—the gayest, busiest most

industrious little shops in the world. There are shops for provisions, where the delightful

macaroni lies in its various bins, and all kinds of frugal and nourishing foods are offered

for sale. There are shops for clothes and dyed finery; there are shops for boots, where

boots hang in festoons like onions outside the window—I have never seen so many bootshops

at once in my life as I saw in the streets surrounding the house of Columbus. And

every shop that is not a provision-shop or a clothes-shop or a boot-shop, is a wine-shop—

or at least you would think so, until you remember, after you have walked through the

street, what a lot of other kinds of shops you have seen on your way. There are shops for

newspapers and tobacco, for cheap jewellery, for brushes, for chairs and tables and

articles of wood; there are shops with great stacks and piles of crockery; there are shops

for cheese and butter and milk—indeed from this one little street in Genoa you could

supply every necessary and every luxury of a humble life.