to sell Livorno to Florence. Passing thence into the street of the
jewellers, Strada degli Orefici, where every sort of silver filigree
work may be found, with coral and amber, you come to Madonna of the
Street Corner, a Virgin and Child, with S. Lo, the patron of all sorts
of smiths, a seventeenth-century work of Piola. These narrow shadowy
ways full of men and women and joyful with children are the delight of
Genoa. There is but little to see, you may think,--little enough but
just life. For Genoa is not a museum: she lives, and the laughter of her
children is the greatest of all the joyful poems of Italy, maybe the
only one that is immortal.

With this thought in your heart (as it is sure to be everywhere in
Italy) you return (as one continually does) to the Arcades, and turning
to the left you follow them till you come to Via S. Lorenzo, in which is
the Duomo all of white and black marble, a jewel with mystery in its
heart, hidden away among the houses of life.

It was built on the site of a church which commemorated the passing of
S. Lorenzo through Genoa. Much of the present church is work of the
twelfth century, such as the side doors and the walls, but the façade
was built early in the fourteenth century, while the tower and the choir
were not finished till 1617. The dome was made by Galeazzo Alessi, the
Perugian who built so much in Genoa, as we shall see later. Possibly the
bas-reliefs strewn on the north wall are work of the Roman period, but
they are not of much interest save to an archeologist.

Within, the church is dark, and this I think is a disappointment, nor is
it very rich or lovely. Some work of Matteo Civitali is still to be seen
in a side chapel on the left, but the only remarkable thing in the
church itself is the chapel of St. John Baptist, into which no woman