The Home In Genoa - 3
As you still go up, the street takes a slight bend; and immediately before you, you see it
spanned by the lofty crumbled arch of St. Andrew's Gate, with its two mighty towers one
on each side. Just as you see it you are at Columbus's house. The number is thirty-seven;
it is like any of the other houses, tall and narrow; and there is a slab built into the wall
above the first storey, on which is written this inscription:—
NVLLA DOMVS TITVLO DIGNIOR
HEIC
PATERNIS IN AEDIBV
CHRISTOPHORVS COLVMBVS
PVERITIAM
PRIMAMQVE IVVENTAM TRANSEGIT
You stop and look at it; and presently you become conscious of a difference between it
and all the other houses. They are all alert, busy, noisy, crowded with life in every storey,
oozing vitality from every window; but of all the narrow vertical strips that make up the
houses of the street, this strip numbered thirty-seven is empty, silent, and dead. The
shutters veil its windows; within it is dark, empty of furniture, and inhabited only by a
memory and a spirit. It is a strange place in which to stand and to think of all that has
happened since the man of our thoughts looked forth from these windows, a common
little boy. The world is very much alive in the Vico Dritto di Ponticello; the little freshet
of life that flows there flows loud and incessant; and yet into what oceans of death and
silence has it not poured since it carried forth Christopher on its stream! One thinks of the
continent of that New World that he discovered, and all the teeming millions of human
lives that have sprung up and died down, and sprung up again, and spread and increased
there; all the ploughs that have driven into its soil, the harvests that have ripened, the
waving acres and miles of grain that have answered the call of Spring and Autumn since
first the bow of his boat grated on the shore of Guanahani. And yet of the two scenes this
narrow shuttered house in a bye-street of Genoa is at once the more wonderful and more
credible; for it contains the elements of the other. Walls and floors and a roof, a place to
eat and sleep in, a place to work and found a family, and give tangible environment to a
human soul—there is all human enterprise and discovery, effort, adventure, and life in
that.
If Christopher wanted to go down to the sea he would have to pass under the Gate of St.
Andrew, with the old prison, now pulled down to make room for the modern buildings,
on his right, and go down the Salita del Prione, which is a continuation of the Vico Dritto
di Ponticello. It slopes downwards from the Gate as the first street sloped upwards to it;
and it contains the same assortment of shops and of houses, the same mixture of
handicrafts and industries, as were seen in the Vico Dritto di Ponticello. Presently he
would come to the Piazza dell' Erbe, where there is no grass, but only a pleasant circle of
little houses and shops, with already a smack of the sea in them, chiefly suggested by the
shops of instrument-makers, where to-day there are compasses and sextants and
chronometers. Out of the Piazza you come down the Via di San Donato and into the
Piazza of that name, where for over nine centuries the church of San Donato has faced
the sun and the weather. From there Christopher's young feet would follow the winding
Via di San Bernato, a street also inhabited by craftsmen and workers in wood and metal;
and at the last turn of it, a gash of blue between the two cliffwalls of houses, you see the
Mediterranean.
Here, then, between the narrow little house by the Gate and the clamour and business of
the sea-front, our Christopher's feet carried him daily during some part of his childish
life. What else he did, what he thought and felt, what little reflections he had, are but
matters of conjecture. Genoa will tell you nothing more. You may walk over the very
spot where he was born; you may unconsciously tread in the track of his vanished feet;
you may wander about the wharves of the city, and see the ships loading and unloading—
different ships, but still trafficking in commodities not greatly different from those of his
day; you may climb the heights behind Genoa, and look out upon the great curving Gulf
from Porto Fino to where the Cape of the western Riviera dips into the sea; you may walk
along the coast to Savona, where Domenico had one of his many habitations, where he
kept the tavern, and whither Christopher's young feet must also have walked; and you
may come back and search again in the harbour, from the old Mole and the Bank of St.
George to where the port and quays stretch away to the medley of sailing-ships and
steamers; but you will not find any sign or trace of Christopher. No echo of the little
voice that shrilled in the narrow street sounds in the Vico Dritto; the houses stand gaunt
and straight, with a brilliant strip of blue sky between their roofs and the cool street
beneath; but they give you nothing of what you seek. If you see a little figure running
towards you in a blue smock, the head fair-haired, the face blue-eyed and a little freckled
with the strong sunshine, it is not a real figure; it is a child of your dreams and a ghost of
the past. You may chase him while he runs about the wharves and stumbles over the
ropes, but you will never catch him. He runs before you, zigzagging over the cobbles, up
the sunny street, into the narrow house; out again, running now towards the Duomo,
hiding in the porch of San Stefano, where the weavers held their meetings; back again
along the wharves; surely he is hiding behind that mooring-post! But you look, and he is
not there—nothing but the old harbour dust that the wind stirs into a little eddy while you
look. For he belongs not to you or me, this child; he is not yet enslaved to the great
purpose, not yet caught up into the machinery of life. His eye has not yet caught the fire
of the sun setting on a western sea; he is still free and happy, and belongs only to those
who love him. Father and mother, brothers Bartolomeo and Giacomo, sister Biancinetta,
aunts, uncles, and cousins possibly, and possibly for a little while an old grandmother at
Quinto—these were the people to whom that child belonged. The little life of his first
decade, unviolated by documents or history, lives happily in our dreams, as blank as
sunshine.
As you still go up, the street takes a slight bend; and immediately before you, you see it
spanned by the lofty crumbled arch of St. Andrew's Gate, with its two mighty towers one
on each side. Just as you see it you are at Columbus's house. The number is thirty-seven;
it is like any of the other houses, tall and narrow; and there is a slab built into the wall
above the first storey, on which is written this inscription:—
NVLLA DOMVS TITVLO DIGNIOR
HEIC
PATERNIS IN AEDIBV
CHRISTOPHORVS COLVMBVS
PVERITIAM
PRIMAMQVE IVVENTAM TRANSEGIT
You stop and look at it; and presently you become conscious of a difference between it
and all the other houses. They are all alert, busy, noisy, crowded with life in every storey,
oozing vitality from every window; but of all the narrow vertical strips that make up the
houses of the street, this strip numbered thirty-seven is empty, silent, and dead. The
shutters veil its windows; within it is dark, empty of furniture, and inhabited only by a
memory and a spirit. It is a strange place in which to stand and to think of all that has
happened since the man of our thoughts looked forth from these windows, a common
little boy. The world is very much alive in the Vico Dritto di Ponticello; the little freshet
of life that flows there flows loud and incessant; and yet into what oceans of death and
silence has it not poured since it carried forth Christopher on its stream! One thinks of the
continent of that New World that he discovered, and all the teeming millions of human
lives that have sprung up and died down, and sprung up again, and spread and increased
there; all the ploughs that have driven into its soil, the harvests that have ripened, the
waving acres and miles of grain that have answered the call of Spring and Autumn since
first the bow of his boat grated on the shore of Guanahani. And yet of the two scenes this
narrow shuttered house in a bye-street of Genoa is at once the more wonderful and more
credible; for it contains the elements of the other. Walls and floors and a roof, a place to
eat and sleep in, a place to work and found a family, and give tangible environment to a
human soul—there is all human enterprise and discovery, effort, adventure, and life in
that.
If Christopher wanted to go down to the sea he would have to pass under the Gate of St.
Andrew, with the old prison, now pulled down to make room for the modern buildings,
on his right, and go down the Salita del Prione, which is a continuation of the Vico Dritto
di Ponticello. It slopes downwards from the Gate as the first street sloped upwards to it;
and it contains the same assortment of shops and of houses, the same mixture of
handicrafts and industries, as were seen in the Vico Dritto di Ponticello. Presently he
would come to the Piazza dell' Erbe, where there is no grass, but only a pleasant circle of
little houses and shops, with already a smack of the sea in them, chiefly suggested by the
shops of instrument-makers, where to-day there are compasses and sextants and
chronometers. Out of the Piazza you come down the Via di San Donato and into the
Piazza of that name, where for over nine centuries the church of San Donato has faced
the sun and the weather. From there Christopher's young feet would follow the winding
Via di San Bernato, a street also inhabited by craftsmen and workers in wood and metal;
and at the last turn of it, a gash of blue between the two cliffwalls of houses, you see the
Mediterranean.
Here, then, between the narrow little house by the Gate and the clamour and business of
the sea-front, our Christopher's feet carried him daily during some part of his childish
life. What else he did, what he thought and felt, what little reflections he had, are but
matters of conjecture. Genoa will tell you nothing more. You may walk over the very
spot where he was born; you may unconsciously tread in the track of his vanished feet;
you may wander about the wharves of the city, and see the ships loading and unloading—
different ships, but still trafficking in commodities not greatly different from those of his
day; you may climb the heights behind Genoa, and look out upon the great curving Gulf
from Porto Fino to where the Cape of the western Riviera dips into the sea; you may walk
along the coast to Savona, where Domenico had one of his many habitations, where he
kept the tavern, and whither Christopher's young feet must also have walked; and you
may come back and search again in the harbour, from the old Mole and the Bank of St.
George to where the port and quays stretch away to the medley of sailing-ships and
steamers; but you will not find any sign or trace of Christopher. No echo of the little
voice that shrilled in the narrow street sounds in the Vico Dritto; the houses stand gaunt
and straight, with a brilliant strip of blue sky between their roofs and the cool street
beneath; but they give you nothing of what you seek. If you see a little figure running
towards you in a blue smock, the head fair-haired, the face blue-eyed and a little freckled
with the strong sunshine, it is not a real figure; it is a child of your dreams and a ghost of
the past. You may chase him while he runs about the wharves and stumbles over the
ropes, but you will never catch him. He runs before you, zigzagging over the cobbles, up
the sunny street, into the narrow house; out again, running now towards the Duomo,
hiding in the porch of San Stefano, where the weavers held their meetings; back again
along the wharves; surely he is hiding behind that mooring-post! But you look, and he is
not there—nothing but the old harbour dust that the wind stirs into a little eddy while you
look. For he belongs not to you or me, this child; he is not yet enslaved to the great
purpose, not yet caught up into the machinery of life. His eye has not yet caught the fire
of the sun setting on a western sea; he is still free and happy, and belongs only to those
who love him. Father and mother, brothers Bartolomeo and Giacomo, sister Biancinetta,
aunts, uncles, and cousins possibly, and possibly for a little while an old grandmother at
Quinto—these were the people to whom that child belonged. The little life of his first
decade, unviolated by documents or history, lives happily in our dreams, as blank as
sunshine.
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