Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 July 1875 — In Genoa. [ARTICLE]

In Genoa.

Charles Warren Stoddard write* to the San Francisco Chronicle: Genoa is a fresh, busy, imposing city, with an invigorating atmosphere pleasantly -suggestive of the salt sea. Her harbor, which is like the bosom of a vast fountain, inclosed with long moles that rise like a rim above the water, is crowded with shipping. The hills slope to the very shore, and there is scarcely a street in the whole city; save the one that skirts the harbor, that is on an even grade. Borne of these long, narrow and crooked streets are sunk deep into the rocky foundations of the town, and one or two of them tunnel under the prongs ot the high lands that shelter and overshadow the place. Genoa has been called a “ City of. Palaces,” and so she is, but then palaces are vCry common in Italy; there is not a citv but numbers a dozen or so, and no one thinks of boasting of them nowadays. AVe had no SAoner left the great station in the edge of the town than we came upon the monument to Columbus. The statue is of white marble. Columbus leans upon an anchor, while Amerieus kneels at his feet; Religion; Geography, Strength and AVisdoin sit at the four corners of the pedestal, looking dusty and tired. So long as Religion. Geography, Strength and Wisdom are confined to monumcntal marble they behave like ladies; but once endow them with life and you may expert a shower of hair-pins shortly after- There are things worth seeing in, Genoa; there is the autograph of Columbus, celebrated'for its association with the “ Innocents Abroad.” The palaces are burdened with gilding; every ceiling is richly frescoed, but the eye- soon grows weary with the superabundant ornamentation—and then it is such a bore to look up at an angle that threatens to dislocate your neck—and as for the frescoes, the figures in them always look as if they were throwing somersaults or standing on their heads. At the cathedral —the exterior of which seems to have been begun after one plan but continued after another, which was ultimately thrown aside and the whole left unfinished —we saw the splendid tomb of John the Baptist,, whose remains were brought from Palestine during the Crusades, At the back of the tomb" hangs a metal chain with which he was bound; but the most interesting relic in Genoa is die vaso catino, out of which our Savior and His disciples are said to have partaken of the paschal lamb, and in which Joseph of Arimathea caught some drops of the blood of the crucified Christ The vessel is of fine glass and wasjaptured by the Genoese at Ctesarea duffing die Crusades. The relics are shown (*th much ceremony, the key being kept by the municipal authorities.