The automobile is only useful in Genoa in getting in and out of town, and even that is accomplished with fear and trembling by the most cold-blooded chauffeur that ever lived. What with the vile roads, the magnificent distances and the ceaseless irresponsible traffic of carts and drays, tramways and what not, Genoa is indeed, of all other cities on earth, in need of a boulevard for the new traffic. To get to your hotel at the further end of the town as you make your entrance by the road circling the base of "La Lanterna," can only be likened to a trip down Broadway in New York at four o'clock in the afternoon. That would not be pleasure; neither is getting in and out of Genoa at any time between five in the morning and seven at night.
To what degenerate depths these great palaces of the Genoa of other days have fallen only the curious and inquisitive are likely to know. One into which we penetrated--looking for something which wasn't there--was a veritable hive of industry, and as cosmopolitan as Babylon. It was near the Bourse and one entered marble halls by a marble staircase, flanked by a marble balustrade and finished off with newel posts supported by marble lions. The great entrance hall was surrounded by a colonnade of svelt marble columns, and in the centre ascended a monumental marble staircase. Two marble fountains played in an inner courtyard, which was paved with marble flags, and a statue, also marble, in a niche faced the great doorway.
On the first floor were more marble columns and a frescoed vaulting. From the corridors opened a battery of doors into offices of all sorts of industrial enterprises, from one given to exploiting a new combustible to another which was financing a rubber plantation in Abyssinia. A chestnut-roaster was perambulating the corridors with his stock in trade, furnace all alight, and a brown-robed monk was begging his daily bread.
On the next floor, up another marble staircase, were still other business offices,--shipping firms, wine-factors and one Guiseppe Bellini, representing an American factory, whose output of agricultural machinery is found in all four quarters of the globe. Breakfast foods were there, too, and there was a big lithograph of a Fall River Line Steamer on the walls. A whole city of merchants and agents were cloistered here in the five stories of this one-time ducal abode.