Genoa. – I have been looking at this city for a long time, at its villas and pleasure-gardens and the wide circumference of its inhabited heights and slopes, and in the end I must say: I see faces that belong to past generations; this region is dotted with images of bold and autocratic human beings. They have lived and wish to live on – that is what they are telling me with their houses, built and adorned to last for centuries and not for the fleeting hour: they were well disposed towards life, however badly disposed they often may have been towards themselves. I keep seeing the builder, how he rests his gaze on everything built near and afar as well as on city, sea, and mountain contours, and how with his gaze he is perpetrating acts of violence and conquest: he wants to fit all this into his plan and finally make it his possession by incorporating it into his plan. The whole region is overgrown with this magnificent, insatiable lust for possessions and spoils; and even as these people heeded no boundaries in distant lands and, in their thirst for what was new, placed a new world beside the old one, so, too, at home each flared up against the other and found a way to express his superiority and place his personal infinity between himself and his neighbour. Each conquered his homeland again for himself by overwhelming it with his architectural ideas and refashioning it, so to speak, into a house that was a feast for his eyes. In the North one is impressed by the law and by the general delight in lawfulness and obedience as one considers the way cities are built: this allows one to recognize the inner propensity to uniformity and conformism which must have dominated the souls of all the builders. But here you find, upon turning every corner, a separate human being who knows the sea, adventure, and the Orient; a human being averse to the law and to the neighbour as to a kind of boredom, who measures everything old and established with envious eyes: he would, with a marvellous cunning of imagination, like to establish all this anew at least in thought; to put his hand to it, his meaning into it – if only for the moment of a sunny afternoon when his insatiable and melancholy soul feels sated for once, and only what is his own and nothing alien may appear to his eye.