Genoa, a more popular and more turbulent republic, subsisted only by her fleet and her commerce.  Hemmed in between barren mountains and a gulf without a shore, it was only a port peopled by sailors.  The marble palaces, built one above the other on the rocky banks, looked down on the sea, their sole territory.  The portraits of the doges and the statue of Andrea Doria constantly reminded the Genoese that from the waves had proceeded their riches and their renown, and that there alone they could hope to look for them.  Its ramparts were impregnable, its arsenals full; and thus Genoa formed the stronghold of armed commerce.

The immense country of Tuscany, governed and rendered illustrious by the Medici, those Pericles of Italy, was learned, agricultural, industrious, but unwarlike.  The house of Austria ruled it by its archdukes, and these princes of the north, transported to the palaces of the Pitti or the Como, contracted the mild and elegant manners of the Tuscans; and the climate and serenity of the hills of Florence softened there even tyranny, and these princes became voluptuaries or sages.  Florence, the city of Leo X., of philosophy, and the arts, had transformed even religion.  Catholicism, so ascetic in Spain, so gloomy in the north, so austere and literal in France, so popular at Rome, had become at Florence, under the Medici and the Grecian philosophers, a species of luminous and Platonic theory, whose dogmata were only sacred symbols, and whose pomps were only pleasures that overpowered the mind and the senses.  The churches at Florence were more museums of Christ than his sanctuaries; the colonies of all the arts and trades of Greece had emigrated, on the entry of Mahomet II. into Constantinople, to Florence, and there they had prospered; and a new Athens, enriched like the ancient with temples, porticoes, and statues, beautified the banks of the Arno.

Leopold, the philosopher prince, awaited there, busied in learning the art of governing men and putting in practice new theories of political economy, the moment to mount the imperial throne of Austria, where his destiny was not to leave him long.  He was the Germanicus of Germany, and philosophy could alone display him to the world, after having lent him for a few years to Italy.

Piedmont, whose frontiers reached to the heart of France by the Alpine valleys, and on the other side the walls of Genoa and the Austrian possessions on the Po, was governed by the house of Savoy, one of the most ancient of the royal lines in Europe.  This military monarchy had its intrenched camp, rather than its capital, in Turin.  The plains it occupied in Italy had been, and were destined to be, the field of battle for Austria and France; and her positions were the keys of Italy.