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It was close by that the blessed Sirus "drew out the dreadful serpent named Basilisk in the year 550." What this serpent may really have been no one knows, but Carlone has painted the scene in fresco in S. Siro.
Women in San Remo work all day, but men and boys play for the most part at bowls or toss-penny or leap-frog or morra. San Siro, the cathedral, stands at one end of the square. Do not go inside; it has a sickly smell of immemorial incense and garlic, undefinable and horrible. Far better looks San Siro from the parapet above the torrent.
At the word of Francesco Spinola they rose, in 1436, killed the Milanese governor outside the Church of S. Siro, and once more declared a Republic.
Of all Borgognone's pictures in the Certosa, I should select the altar-piece of St. Siro with St. Lawrence and St. Stephen and two fathers of the Church, for its fusion of this master's qualities. The Certosa is a wilderness of lovely workmanship.
The "Saracen towers" with which the coast is studded tell to this day the tale of the raids of Barbarossa and Dragut. The blow fell heavily on San Remo. The ruined quarter beneath its wall still witnesses to the heathen fury. San Siro, which lay without the walls, was more than once desecrated and reduced to ruin.
The story of San Remo begins with Saracenic inroads from Corsica and Sardinia in the ninth century, to which Nizza, Oneglia, and Genoa owed their walls. But before this time the wild Ligurian coast had afforded hermitages to the earlier bishops of Genoa; to Siro who became its apostle, to Romolo who was destined to give his name to the territory of the town.
Ruined as it is, like all the churches of the Riviera, by the ochre and stucco of a tasteless restoration, San Siro still retains much of the characteristic twelfth-century work of its first foundation. The alliance of the city with Genoa was that of a perfectly free State.
This castello, destroyed in the quarrels of Guelph and Ghibelline, as some have thought, may be found in the hall-mark of the silver vessels made here under the Republic. Very few are the remnants that have come down to us from the time of the Bishops. An inscription, however, on a house in Via S. Luca close to S. Siro remains, telling how in the year 580 S. Siro destroyed the serpent Basilisk.
Perhaps we, who unlike Varus have not heard the original lectures, may not be able in every case to discover the theme from the myth, but the poet has at least set us out on the right scent by making the first riddles very easy. Vergil had not then met Siro, but he may have read some of his lectures.
Lodging I was not fastidious about, neither did I long for drink, nor clothes, nor women. So I put up at a bit of an upstairs albergo in the Via S. Siro, where one who knows the ropes can get a decent room for a lira, and spent my time and money in having daily a real good dinner and hearing some tip-top music. And, by Jove, I did enjoy myself.
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