Genoa, Italy
Genoa (Genova in Italian) is “the most winding, incoherent of cities, the most entangled topographical ravel in the world,” said Henry James. I couldn’t agree more. It’s a complicated dichotomy of beauty & squalor, ancient & modern, welcoming & menacing…all at the same time. There is a vibrancy that makes even the old city, said to be the largest in Europe, feel full of life and still very local. It’s a city constantly abuzz with activity and noise with some very rough edges. It’s a bit of an “all of all of it” experience.
A Brief history of Genoa
Genoa, the capital of Liguria, sits in a prime location, framed by the Ligurian Apennines, which encompass the waterfront, city center, and the port. Overlooking the Ligurian Sea, it was the capital of one of the four major Italian maritime republics (the others being Venice, Pisa and Amalfi) from 1099 to 1797, becoming one of the greatest naval powers on the continent.
Genoa made its money at sea, through trade, colonial exploitation and piracy. It was a local superpower with its own well-developed system of government that lasted several hundred years. By the thirteenth century, after playing a major part in the Crusades, the Genoese were roaming the Mediterranean, bringing back ideas as well as goods: the city’s architects were using Arab pointed arches a century before the rest of Italy.
The San Giorgio banking syndicate effectively controlled the city for much of the fifteenth century, and cold-shouldered Columbus (who had grown up in Genoa) when he sought funding for his voyages. With Spanish backing, he opened up new Atlantic trade routes that ironically would later reduce Genoa to a backwater.
Following foreign invasion, in 1768 the Banco di San Giorgio was forced to sell the Genoese colony of Corsica to the French, and a century later, the city became a hotbed of radicalism: Mazzini, one of the main protagonists of the Risorgimento, was born here, and in 1860 Garibaldi set sail for Sicily with his “Thousand” from the city’s harbor.
Around the same time, Italy’s industrial revolution began in Genoa, with steelworks and shipyards spreading along the coast. These suffered heavy bombing in World War II, and the subsequent economic decline hobbled Genoa for decades.
Things started to look up in the 1990s: state funding to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s 1492 voyage paid to renovate many of the city’s late-Renaissance palaces and the old port area, with Genoa’s most famous son of modern times, Renzo Piano (co-designer of Paris’s Pompidou Centre), taking a leading role. The result of a twelve-year program that saw Genoa becoming a European Capital of Culture in 2004.
Reunited, both our first times in Genova, Italia…Shayne and I were eager to start our new adventure. There was a bottle of Prosecco involved at the start…as if there was ever a doubt. We stayed in a well-located Airbnb that turned out to be directly next door to an active brothel. That added to our interesting experience of this city. This delicious meal pictured below was the first of many!
As I say all the time, the only way to get to know a city is to walk it…and so we did. In and out and up and down all the narrow passageways opening to festive squares. The historical center is a dense and fascinating patchwork of caruggis, medieval alleyways, many interesting and fun to explore while others could be very dark and foreboding, no wider than my wingspan. Here I offer a word of caution, it can be very easy to wander into the wrong alleyway, we found out quickly we would not want to make that mistake after nightfall. It was just dark and threatening enough during the day to make ones spidey senses activate. Yet one could hurry out of the wrong alley, turn a corner, and walk head long into one of the Renaissance palaces on a street like Via Garibaldi. We’d go from dark, graffitied, and rough surroundings onto streets with large palazzis built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Genoa’s wealthy mercantile families, now museums housing Genoas finest art.
“The most winding and incoherent of cities indeed!”
Piazza De Ferrari is one of the central points of Genoa’s old town with its famous fountain and the red logo of the city (pictured above).
Just a short walk from Piazza De Ferrari stands the Porta Soprana, a preserved city gate which was once part of Genoa’s city walls. Two large stone towers sit on either side of this arched gateway, all of which makes it an impressive sight to see.
Right next to the Porta is the house where Genoa’s native son, Christopher Columbus (born here in 1451) grew up. The late writer Louis Inturrisi cites one of Columbus’s biographers, who asserted: “Only a Ligurian could have conceived of the idea of sailing West to reach East.”
A city of paradoxes!
