I have not read or heard that the outsides of the houses of any other European city are frescoed in this way.
I can not conceive of such a thing as Genoa in ruins.

Such massive arches, such ponderous substructions as support these towering broad-winged edifices, we have seldom seen before; and surely the great blocks of stone of which these edifices are built can never decay; walls that are as thick as an ordinary American doorway is high cannot crumble.
The republics of Genoa and Pisa were very powerful in the Middle Ages.
Their ships filled the Mediterranean, and they carried on an extensive commerce with Constantinople and Syria.

Their warehouses were the great distributing depots from whence the costly merchandise of the East was sent abroad over Europe.

They were warlike little nations and defied, in those days, governments that overshadow them now as mountains overshadow molehills.

The Saracens captured and pillaged Genoa nine hundred years ago, but during the following century Genoa and Pisa entered into an offensive and defensive alliance and besieged the Saracen colonies in Sardinia and the Balearic Isles with an obstinacy that maintained its pristine vigor and held to its purpose for forty long years.