may enter, because of the dancing of Salome, daughter of Herodias. There
in a marble urn the ashes of the Messenger have lain for eight
centuries, not without worship, for here have knelt Pope Alexander III,
our own Richard Cordelion, Federigo Barbarossa, Henry IV after Canossa,
Innocent IV, fugitive before Federigo II, Henry VII of Germany, St.
Catherine of Siena, and often too, St. Catherine Adorni, Louis XII of
France, Don John of Austria after Lepanto, and maybe, who knows,
Velasquez of Spain, Vandyck from England, and behind them, all the
misery of Genoa through the centuries, an immense and pitiful company of
men and women crying in the silence to him who had cried in the
wilderness.

Other curious, strange, and wonderful things, too, S. Lorenzo holds for
us in her treasury: a piece of the True Cross set in a cruciform casket
of gold crusted with precious stones, stolen, as most relics have been,
this one from the Venetians in the fourth Crusade, when the Emperor
Baldwin, whom Venice had crowned, sent it as gift to Pope Innocent III
by a Venetian galley, which, caught in a storm, took shelter in Modone
in Hellas, where two Genoese galleys found her and, having looted her,
sent the relic to S. Lorenzo in Genoa magnanimously, as Giustiniani
says. Here also beside this wonder you may see the cup of the Holy
Grail, stolen by the French, who, forced to return it, sent this broken
green glass in place of the perfect emerald they carried away; or maybe,
who knows, it was but glass in the beginning. Yet, indeed, the Genoese
paid a great price for it, thinking it truly the emerald of the Precious
Blood, but they may have deceived themselves in the joy that followed
the winning of the Holy City: though that is not like Genoa. However
this may be, and with relics you are as like to be right as wrong
whatever your opinion, there is but little else worth seeing in S.
Lorenzo.