Italy, maybe the
only one that is immortal.

With this thought in your heart (as it is sure to be everywhere in
Italy) you return (as one continually does) to the Arcades, and turning
to the left you follow them till you come to Via S. Lorenzo, in which is
the Duomo all of white and black marble, a jewel with mystery in its
heart, hidden away among the houses of life.

It was built on the site of a church which commemorated the passing of
S. Lorenzo through Genoa. Much of the present church is work of the
twelfth century, such as the side doors and the walls, but the facade
was built early in the fourteenth century, while the tower and the choir
were not finished till 1617. The dome was made by Galeazzo Alessi, the
Perugian who built so much in Genoa, as we shall see later. Possibly the
bas-reliefs strewn on the north wall are work of the Roman period, but
they are not of much interest save to an archeologist.

Within, the church is dark, and this I think is a disappointment, nor is
it very rich or lovely. Some work of Matteo Civitali is still to be seen
in a side chapel on the left, but the only remarkable thing in the
church itself is the chapel of St. John Baptist, into which no woman
may enter, because of the dancing of Salome, daughter of Herodias. There
in a marble urn the ashes of the Messenger have lain for eight
centuries, not without worship, for here have knelt Pope Alexander III,
our own Richard Cordelion, Federigo Barbarossa, Henry IV after Canossa,
Innocent IV, fugitive before Federigo II, Henry VII of Germany, St.
Catherine of Siena, and often too, St. Catherine Adorni, Louis XII of
France, Don John of Austria after Lepanto, and maybe, who knows,
Velasquez of Spain, Vandyck from England, and behind them, all the
misery of Genoa through the centuries, an immense and pitiful company of
men and women crying in the silence to him who had cried in the
wilderness.

Other curious, strange, and wonderful things, too, S. Lorenzo holds for
us in her treasury: a piece of the True Cross set in a cruciform casket
of gold crusted with precious stones, stolen, as most relics have been,
this one from the Venetians in the fourth Crusade, when the Emperor
Baldwin, whom Venice had crowned, sent it as gift to Pope Innocent III
by a Venetian galley, which, caught in a storm, took shelter in Modone
in Hellas, where two Genoese galleys found her and, having looted her,
sent the relic to S. Lorenzo in Genoa magnanimously, as