GENOA (
Genova in
Italian) is "the most winding,
incoherent of cities, the most
entangled topographical ravel in the
world." So said Henry James,
and the city is still marvellously
eclectic, full of pace and
rough-edged style. Sprawled behind
the huge port - Italy's largest and
an increasingly popular stopoff for
international cruise liners - is a
dense and fascinating warren of
medieval alleyways, a district which
has more zest than all the coastal
resorts put together.
Genoa made its money at sea,
through trade, colonial exploitation
and piracy. By the thirteenth
century, on the heels of a major
role 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 of
exploration. With Spanish backing,
he opened up new Atlantic trade
routes which ironically reduced Genova
La Superba ("the
proud") 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 harbour. 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 some of
the city's late-Renaissance palaces
and the old port area, with Genoa's
most famous son of modern times, Renzo
Piano (best known as the
co-designer of Paris's Pompidou
Centre), taking a leading role. The
city was the focus of world
attention for the G8 summit in July
2001 ( www.genoa-g8.it ), an
event which marked a L90 billion
programme to prepare for a
well-earned role as European
Capital of Culture in 2004.
The tidying-up hasn't sanitized
the old town , however; the
core of the city, between the two
stations and the waterfront, is
still dark and slightly threatening.
But despite the sleaze, the
overriding impression is of a
buzzing hive of activity - food
shops nestled in the portals of
former palaces, carpenters'
workshops sandwiched between
designer furniture outlets,
everything surrounded by a crush of
people and the squashed vowels of
the impenetrable Genoese dialect
that has, over the centuries,
absorbed elements of Neapolitan,
Calabrese and Portuguese. Aside from
the cosmopolitan street-life, you
should seek out the Cattedrale di
San Lorenzo with its fabulous
treasury, small medieval churches
such as San Donato and Santa
Maria di Castello , and the
Renaissance palazzi that
contain Genoa's art
collections and furniture and decor
from the grandest days of the city's
illustrious past.
