the terror of Nero, landed not far away to the east at Albaro, bringing
with them the new religion. A lane leading down to the sea still bears
the name of one of them, and, strangely as we may think, a ruined church
marks the spot crowning the rock above the place, where a Temple of
Venus once stood. Yet perhaps the earliest remnant of old Genoa is to be
found in the Church of S. Sisto in the Via di Prè, standing as it does
on the very stones of a church raised to the Pope and martyr of that
name in 260. In the journey which Pope Sixtus made to Genoa he is said
to have been accompanied by St. Laurence, and it is probable that a
church was built not much later to him also on the site of the Duomo.
However this may be, Genoa appears to have been passionately Christian,
for the first authority we hear of is that of the Bishops, to whom she
seems to have submitted herself enthusiastically, installing them in the
old castello in that the most ancient part of the city around Piazza
Sarzano and S. Maria di Castello. This castello, destroyed in the
quarrels of Guelph and Ghibelline, as some have thought, may be found in
the hall-mark of the silver vessels made here under the Republic. Very
few are the remnants that have come down to us from the time of the
Bishops. An inscription, however, on a house in Via S. Luca close to S.
Siro remains, telling how in the year 580 S. Siro destroyed the serpent
Basilisk. In the church itself a seventeenth-century fresco commemorates
this monstrous deed.

Of the Lombard dominion something more is left to us; the story at least
of the passing of the dust of St. Augustine. It seems that at the
beginning of the sixth century these sacred ashes had been brought from
Africa to Cagliari to save them from the Vandals. For more than two
hundred years they remained at Cagliari, when, the Saracens taking the
place, Luitprand, the Lombard king, remembering S. Ambrogio and Milan,
ransomed them for a great price and had them brought in 725 to Genoa,