Venice or Rome, she is to-day, when they are passed away into dreams or
have become little more than museums, what she has ever been, a city of
business, the greatest port in the Mediterranean, a city full of various
life,--here a touch of the East, there a whisper of the West, a busy,
brutal, picturesque city, beauty growing up as it does in London,
suddenly for a moment out of the life of the place, not made or
contrived as in Paris or Florence, but naturally, a living thing, shy
and evanescent. Here poverty and riches jostle one another side by side
as they do in life, and are antagonistic and hate one another. Yet
Genoa, alone of all the cities of Italy proper is living to-day, living
the life of to-day, and with all her glorious past she is as much a city
of the twentieth century as of any other period of history. For, while
others have gone after dreams and attained them and passed away, she has
clung to life, and the god of this world was ever hers. She has made to
herself friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, and they have remained
faithful to her. Her ports grow and multiply, her trade increases, still
she heaps up riches, and if she cannot tell who shall gather them, at
least she is true to herself and is not dependent on the stranger or the
tourist. The artist, it is said, is something of a daughter of joy, and
in thinking of Florence or Venice, which live on the pleasure of the
stranger, we may find the truth of a saying so obvious. Well, Genoa was
never an artist. She was a leader, a merchant, with fleets, with
argosies, with far-flung companies of adventure. Through her gates
passed the silks and porcelains of the East, the gold of Africa, the
slaves and fair women, the booty and loot of life, the trade of the
world. This is her secret. She is living among the dead, who may or may
not awaken.

If you are surprised in her streets by the greatness of old things, it
is only to find yourself face to face with the new. People, tourists do