Ch. 4 - Genoa and Its Neighborhood - Page 2

to correspond, which you ring as long as
you like, and which nobody answers, as it has no connection
whatever with the house. But there is a rusty old knocker, too--
very loose, so that it slides round when you touch it--and if you
learn the trick of it, and knock long enough, somebody comes. The
brave Courier comes, and gives you admittance. You walk into a
seedy little garden, all wild and weedy, from which the vineyard
opens; cross it, enter a square hall like a cellar, walk up a
cracked marble staircase, and pass into a most enormous room with a
vaulted roof and whitewashed walls: not unlike a great Methodist
chapel. This is the sala. It has five windows and five doors, and
is decorated with pictures which would gladden the heart of one of
those picture-cleaners in London who hang up, as a sign, a picture
divided, like death and the lady, at the top of the old ballad:
which always leaves you in a state of uncertainty whether the
ingenious professor has cleaned one half, or dirtied the other.
The furniture of this sala is a sort of red brocade. All the
chairs are immovable, and the sofa weighs several tons.

On the same floor, and opening out of this same chamber, are
dining-room, drawing-room, and divers bedrooms: each with a
multiplicity of doors and windows. Up-stairs are divers other
gaunt chambers, and a kitchen; and down-stairs is another kitchen,
which, with all sorts of strange contrivances for burning charcoal,
looks like an alchemical laboratory. There are also some half-
dozen small sitting-rooms, where the servants in this hot July, may
escape from the heat of the fire, and where the brave Courier plays
all sorts of musical instruments of his own manufacture, all the
evening long. A mighty old, wandering, ghostly, echoing, grim,
bare house it is, as ever I beheld or thought of.

There is a little vine-covered terrace, opening from the drawing-
room; and under this terrace, and forming one side of the little
garden, is what used to be the stable. It is now a cow-house, and
has three cows in it, so that we get new milk by the bucketful.
There is no pasturage near, and they never go out, but are
constantly lying down, and surfeiting themselves with vine-leaves--
perfect Italian cows enjoying the dolce far' niente all day long.
They are presided over, and slept with, by an old man named
Antonio, and his son; two burnt-sienna natives with naked legs and
feet, who wear, each, a shirt, a pair of trousers, and a red sash,
with a relic, or some sacred charm like the bonbon off a twelfth-
cake, hanging round the neck. The old man is very anxious to
convert me to the Catholic faith, and exhorts me frequently. We
sit upon a stone by the door, sometimes in the evening, like