Page:Book of the Riviera.djvu/355

Rh The visitor from the north of Europe is perplexed how to determine approximately the dates of the domestic buildings in every one of these Ligurian towns and villages. The architecture has a modern look, and yet the houses are decrepit, ruinous, and shabby. The windows and doors are square-headed, with scarce a moulding to differentiate them, and the pointed arch is only seen in the bridges that tie the houses together. Rarely, only in some palace or town hall, does the swallow-tail crenelation, or a feeble imitation of Gothic cornice, speak of the Middle Ages. The fact is that the streets are so narrow that there is no room for display of street architecture in these lanes, culs de sac, and thoroughfares, that allow no wheeled conveyance to pass up and down. The houses set their noses against each other and stare into each other's eyes. There is no privacy there, not even in smells. If a man eats garlic, every one sniffs it in the house opposite. If a woman administers a curtain lecture, all the occupants of the houses vis-à-vis prick up their ears, listen to every word, and mark every intonation of voice. Into no single room has the sun looked for a thousand years, and air has been but grudgingly admitted, and never allowed to circulate. The houses run up five, six, even seven storeys, and are tenanted by many families. Those nearest the pavement partake of the first whiff of the garbage of the street, the dejections of the tenants in the tenements above; and those in the topmost storey inhale the flavour of stale humanity ascending from all the flats below. But to revert to the architecture. I do not suppose that it has altered since classic times. We know how it was in Rome among the insulæ, blocks of dwellings