Free Genoa by Paul Metcalf Page A

Scheria, home of Nausicaa and the Phaeacians, UIysses’ longest resting place before his return home—like Atlantis, it boasted a great city, and was located beyond the Pillars of Hercules.
    And Tarshish, the port for which Jonah set sail from Joppa.
                                             (Melville in Joppa: “No sleep last night—only resource to cut tobacco, and watch the six windows of my room, which is like a lighthouse—& hear the surf & wind . . . I have such a feeling in this lonely old Joppa, with the prospect of a long detention here, owing to the surf—that it is only by stern self-control & grim defiance that I continue to keep cool and patient.”
    Joppa, the point of departure, the Palos, from which Jonah sought to escape, to Tarshish . . .
    But perhaps Tarshish, Atlantis, and Scheria were all one: islands locked in the minds of those who dwelt in the internal sea . . .
    perhaps they were all Cadiz: the barbaric western city beyond the Pillars, on the southwest shore of Spain (not far from Palos), where the Guadalquivir pours into “the real ocean,” as the Egyptian priest called it; or, in the words of the Arabians, “the green sea of gloom” . . .
    The Western Ocean.
               In Lisbon, the sailors say: “He who sails beyond the Cape of No may return or not.
               “For many said: how is it possible to sail beyond a Cape which the navigators of Spain had set as the terminus and end of all navigation in those parts, as men who knew that the sea beyond was not navigable, not only because of the strong currents, but because it was very broken with so much boiling over of its waters that it sucked up all the ships.”

TWO
    there was Marco Polo, talking of Cipango, from a jail cell in Genoa:
    reporting it to be fifteen hundred miles east of Asia, to be reached by huge Chinese ships made of the fir tree, ships that sailed freely upon the ocean that washed the eastern shores of that continent . . .
                                             (and if Asia extended to the ocean, and Cipango were fifteen hundred miles east of Asia—to where did the ocean extend?
               And Melville in Genoa: “Ramparts overhanging the open sea, arches thrown over ravines. Fine views of sections of town. Up & up. Galley-slave prison. Gratings commanding view of sea—infinite liberty.”
    And Genoa itself:
               “Janus, the first king of Italy, and descended from the Giants, founded Genoa on this spot in the time of Abraham; and Janus, Prince of Troy, skilled in astronomy, while sailing in search of a place wherein to dwell in healthfulness and security, came to the same Genoa founded by Janus, King of Italy and great-grandson of Noah; and seeing that the sea and the encompassing hills seemed in all things convenient, he increased it in fame and greatness.”
    Janus, Roman god,
    doorkeeper of the firmament, presider over gates, the entrance upon and beginning of things . . .
    Ianus geminus, faced front and back,
    East and West . . .
    I close my eyes, and there is again a sense of split, a jagged crease running the length of my forehead—only for a moment, and it is gone.
    Genoa,
    at the northernmost pitch of the Ligurian Sea, turning
    southeast, to trade with the East, and
    southwest, perhaps, through the Pillars of Hercules, to
    the Terrestrial Paradise . . . (for many philosophers believe this will be found south of the equator, the torrid zone serving as a flaming sword to ward off invasion. They divide the globe into northern and southern hemispheres, the southern being the head, or better part, and the northern the feet, or lesser part (this being confirmed by the stars of the southern hemisphere, which shine with a larger and brighter aspect). The east, according to the philosophers, is to the right, and to the left, the west.)
    In Genoa. in the year 1451, Susanna Columbus,