Page 82 - Lanzarotto Malocello from Italy to the Canary Islands

82 from Italy to the Canary Islands

The Ligurian scene in the

Late Middle Ages

n De Bello Civile
Julius Caesar stated:
“Navigare necesse
est” (sailing is necessary).
This must be the epitaph
most forged in bronze for the
historically dead marineria
of the Maritime Republic of Genoa’s trade of in the fifteenth century.
Genoa; we should say epitaph Painting by Capranesi, Bank of Italy - Genoa.
forged in bronze, for up to the
end of World War I medals commemorating the victory were still forged
with molten bronze from captured enemy cannons (to this day, those cross-
ing the Straße des 17 Juni in Berlin can see in its middle the bronze column
of victory, erected with the metal taken from the French cannons in the
Franco-Prussian War of 1870). And yet the Maritime Republic of Genoa
was almost always victorious on that sea, which represented its “living
space”.
The morphology itself of Liguria is there to show us that the bright
future of Genoa could be nowhere else but “nel profondo cuor del so-
nante mar Mediterraneo” (deep in the heart of the resounding Mediterra-
nean Sea). Anyone looking at a geographical map of the Ligurian region
can understand that the strength of the territory is precisely the convex
mountainous arc, represented by the cordillera of the Ligurian Alps, the
Ligurian Apennines and the Lunigiana Mountains, which guarantees re-
assuring protection from invasions from the North, making them virtually
impossible.
Precisely this protection is however also a limit to territorial growth by
the people of Liguria, who – unable to grow in the hinterland – looked to
the sea as a future prospect of life.
The above background makes us understand that as the Roman Empire,