old and precious canvas still hangs on the walls, and the spoiled
frescoes of the beautiful portico are fading in the sun.

It is perhaps in the Via Garibaldi, Via Cairoli, and Via Balbi, avenues
of palaces narrow because of the summer sun, bordered on either side by
triumphant slums, that the real Genoa splendid and living may best be
surprised. Here, amid all the grave and yet homely magnificence of the
princes of the State, life, with a brilliance and a misery all its own,
ebbs and flows, and is not to be denied. Between two palaces of marble,
silent, and full maybe of the masterpieces of dead painters, you may
catch sight of the city of the people, a "truogolo" perhaps with a great
fountain in the midst, where the girls and women are washing clothes,
and the children, whole companies of them, play about the doorways,
while above, the houses, and indeed the court itself, are bright with
coloured cloths and linen drying in the wind and the sun. It is a city
like London that you discover, living fiercely and with all its might,
but without the brutality of our more terrible life, where as here
wealth rises up in the midst of poverty, only here wealth is noble and
without the blatancy and self-satisfaction you find in our squares, and
poverty has not lost all its joyfulness, its air of simplicity and
romance, as it has with us.

It is these palaces, so noble and, as one might think, so deserted, that
Galeazzo Alessi built in the sixteenth century for the nobles of Genoa.
And it is his work, whole streets of it, that has named the city the
City of Palaces, as we say, and has given her something of that proud
look which clings to her in her title, La Superba. Yet not altogether
from the magnificence of her old streets has this name come to her, but
in part from the character of her people, and in great measure, too,
from her brave position there between the mountains and the sea, a city