The Mediterranean: Its Storied Cities and Venerable RuinsAllen, Grant
History
The Mediterranean: Its Storied Cities and Venerable Ruins
Allen, Grant
Europe, Southern -- Description and travel; Mediterranean Region -- Description and travel
more can be said than that it might possibly be as old as the Christian
era. It is almost needless to say that Napoleon carried it away to Paris;
but the worst result of this robbery was that when restitution was made
after the second occupation of that city, the _catino_, through some gross
carelessness, was so badly packed that it was broken on the journey back,
and has been pieced together by a gold-setting of filigree, according to
the guide-books. An inscription in the nave supplies us with an
interesting fact in the early history of Genoa which perhaps ought not to
be omitted. It is that the city was founded by one Janus, a great grandson
of Noah; and that another Janus, after the fall of Troy, also settled in
it. Colonists from that ill-fated town really seem to have distributed
themselves pretty well over the known world.
More than one of the smaller churches of Genoa is of archæological
interest, and the more modern fabric, called L'Annunziata, is extremely
rich in its internal decorations, though these are more remarkable for
their sumptuousness than for their good taste. But one structure calls for
some notice in any account of the city. This is the Campo Santo, or
burial-place of Genoa, situated at some distance without the walls in the
Valley of the Bisagno. A large tract of land on the slope which forms the
right bank of that stream has been converted into a cemetery, and was laid
out on its present plan rather more than twenty-five years since.
Extensive open spaces are enclosed within and divided by corridors with
cloisters; terraces also, connected by flights of steps, lead up to a long
range of buildings situated some distance above the river, in the center
of which is a chapel crowned with a dome, supported internally by large
columns of polished black Como marble. The bodies of the poorer people are
buried in the usual way in the open ground of the cemetery, and the floor
of the corridors appears to cover a continuous series of vaults, closed,
as formerly in our churches, with great slabs of stone; but a very large
number of the dead rest above the ground in vaults constructed on a plan
which has evidently been borrowed from catacombs like those of Rome. There
is, however, this difference, that in the latter the "loculi," or
separate compartments to contain the corpses, were excavated in the rock,
while here they are constructed entirely of masonry. In both cases the
"loculus" is placed with its longer axis parallel to the outer side, as
was occasionally the method in the rock-hewn tombs of Palestine, instead
of having an opening at the narrower end, so that the corpse, whether
coffined or not, lies in the position of a sleeper in the berth of a ship.
After a burial, the loculus, as in the catacombs, is closed, and an
inscription placed on a slab outside. Thus in the Campo Santo at Genoa we
walk through a gallery of tombs. On either hand are ranges of low
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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