h is to-day in appearance virtually
the same as the place in which Christopher and his little brothers and
sisters made the first steps of their pilgrimage through this world. If
the Italian, sun has been shining fiercely upon you, in the great modern
thoroughfare, you will turn into this quarter of narrow streets and high
houses with grateful relief. The past seems to meet you there; and from
the Piazza, gay with its little provision-shops and fruit stalls, you
walk up the slope of the Vico Dritto di Ponticello, leaving the sunlight
behind you, and entering the narrow street like a traveller entering a
mountain gorge.

It is a very curious street this; I suppose there is no street in the
world that has more character. Genoa invented sky-scrapers long before
Columbus had discovered America, or America had invented steel frames for
high building; but although many of the houses in the Vico Dritto di
Ponticello are seven and eight storeys high, the width of the street from
house-wall to house-wall does not average more than nine feet. The
street is not straight, moreover; it winds a little in its ascent to the
old city wall and St. Andrew's Gate, so that you do not even see the sky
much as you look forward and upwards. The jutting cornices of the roofs,
often beautifully decorated, come together in a medley of angles and
corners that practically roof the street over; and only here and there do
you see a triangle or a parallelogram of the vivid brilliant blue that is
the sky. Besides being seven or eight storeys high, the houses are the
narrowest in the world; I should think that their average width on the
street front is ten feet. So as you walk up this street where young
Christopher lived you must think of it in these three dimensions towering
slices of houses, ten or twelve feet in width: a street often not more
than eight and seldom more than fifteen feet in width; and the walls of
the houses themselves, painted in every colour, green and pink and grey
and white, and trellised with the inevitable green window-shutters of the
South, standing like cliffs on each side of you seven or eight rooms
high. There being so little horizontal space for the people to live
there, what little there is is most economically used; and all across the
tops of the houses, high above your head, the cliffs are joined by wires
and clothes-lines from which thousands of brightly-dyed garments are
always hanging and fluttering; higher sti