The sober tone gratifies your eye immensely, and the fact that your eye
has noted it and not attributed the conventional coloring of southern
Europe to the city is a flattery to your pride which you will not
refuse. It is not a setting for opera like Naples; there is something
businesslike in it which agrees with your American mood if you are true
to America, and recalls you to duty if you are not.
I had not been in Genoa since 1864 except for a few days in 1905, and I
saw changes which I will mostly not specify. Already at the earlier date
the railway had cut through the beautiful and reverend Doria garden and
left the old palace some scanty grounds on the sea-level, where commerce
noisily encompassed it with trains and tracks and lines of freight-cars.
But there had remained up to my last visit that grot on the gardened
hill-slope whence a colossal marble Hercules helplessly overlooked the
offence offered by the railroad; and now suddenly here was the lofty
wall of some new edifice stretching across in front of the Hercules and
wholly shutting him from view; for all I know it may have made him part
of its structure.
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