Genova, la superba – Genoa, the proud! This city has long had a mixed reputation, which means that it’s remained refreshingly far from the well-worn tourist track. But with its Roman history, medieval maritime greatness and pivotal role in the great “Age of the Mediterranean”, there is much more to Genoa than pesto, pirates and stunning Riviera scenery. In this destination guide, we set out what’s on offer.

BETWEEN THE MOUNTAINS & THE SEA

First of all, consider Genoa’s geography: wedged between precipitous mountains and the sea, with an excellent deep-water port that favoured pre-modern shipping. There was also its prominent location on the Via Aurelia from the third century BCE, and its physical proximity to the great Po Valley plain of northern Italy. Later, its location south of the alpine passes and near to the currency market at Pavia would encourage its development as a mercantile maritime republic.

There’s a Spanish saying: la geografìa manda, geography decides. The best way to get a sense of how Genoa’s geography shaped its destiny is to head down to its harbour. Unless you’re arriving by sea on a cruise ship, you’ll probably have to walk down the city’s famous caruggi in order to get there.

Genoa stretches along the spines of mountains and hills running directly down to its harbour, and the caruggi connect its numerous ridges

These evocative narrow alleyways are a veritable medieval maze, leading into series of small squares and offering a tiny open space for those in the populous apartment blocks, shops and restaurants that crowd the city’s centro storico. They are beautifully evoked in Michael Winterbottom’s 2008 film, Genova, to our mind the best visual introduction to this beguiling city.

Once you arrive at the Porto Antico, or Old Port, you begin to understand a little more about the city’s development. Still a working port, it has been cut off, in some ways, from conveying the city’s maritime past thanks to a controversial modern fly-over – dogged by endless debate about whether it should be dismantled. Renzo Piano, a local boy turned ‘starchitect’, was integral to plans that have successfully revitalised the Porto Antico in the past decades.

Renzo Piano’s biosphere for Genoa’s Porto Antico (photo: Cristina Sanvito, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

There’s the Aquarium, not as spectacular to Australian eyes but Italy’s best (so beware endless school excursions if you decide to visit). There’s also the Biosfera, a sleek “glass bubble” of a biosphere designed by Piano in 2001, a soothing oasis in the middle of the bustling port that, at over €20 per ticket, is unfortunately best left to enthusiasts.

The frescoed baroque exterior of the Banco di San Giorgio is a reminder of the Republic of Genoa’s financial might: established in 1407, it bankrolled successive generations of Spanish kings and queens and ensured that the Genoese enjoyed disproportionate economic power in the seventeenth-century colonial race.

For our money, the most interesting site on the Porto Antico is Galata Museo del Mare. Europe’s largest maritime museum, it opened in 2004 and it is named for the nineteenth-century commercial dockyards here. They, in turn, were nostalgically called after the Galata neighbourhood in Constantinople/Istanbul, dominated by the Genoese until the inexorable rise of their great rival, Venice.

Inside, you can admire a scale reconstruction of a seventeenth-century Genoese galley. You can understand the maritime achievements of Christopher Columbus and Andrea Doria in excellent galleries dedicated to maritime technology and exploration. Floating outside is the 1976 Nazario Sauro Italian submarine, while on the panoramic upper floors you can trace the trajectory of the thousands of nineteenth-century Italians who migrated to the New World.

And when you’re ready to eat, there is now a convenient Eataly located on the harbourfront, too!

View onto Genoa cathedral and the district of Castello (photo: Steffen Lemmerzahl, Unsplash)

FROM THE HOLY GRAIL TO CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

If you head back up the caruggi behind the Banco di San Giorgio, you’ll enter the Castello district, named for the fortified medieval neighbourhood that represents the ancient core of the city.

You’ll arrive first at the cathedral of San Lorenzo, probably founded in the fifth century, and a somber black and white marble-clad pile that was rebuilt in the fourteenth century. Its most precious relic is the Sacro Catino, an extraordinary basin of transparent green material – its composition is still a matter of debate – that arrived in the city in the early twelfth century and is believed to have been the chalice used by Christ at the Last Supper. That’s correct, none other than the Holy Grail!

Continuing up into Castello, call in at the museum of Santa Maria di Castello. Medieval Genoa – like most of central-northern Italy – was riven by the factional strife of the Guelfs and Ghibellines, and the city’s great martial families turned the land around their palaces into private enclaves that they could defend at will with towers and thick ashlar walls.

The Romanesque church of Santa Maria di Castello stands on the site of a fortified bishopric and alongside the defensive tower of the Embriaci dynasty. Inside is a collection of interesting religious art, with works by emblematic local artists like Domenico Piola, and a moving wooden sculpture of the crucified Christ from the fourteenth century.

The best pieces are preserved in the adjacent monastery museum and include paintings by Ludovico Brea, a fascinating early sixteenth-century artist whose work is found all along the French and Italian Riviera. Brea is always worth a look, and demonstrates how modern notions of “frontiers” and “national styles” just don’t make sense in this interconnected region. Another highlight is Joos von Ravensburg’s lovely Annunciation in an open-air loggia: in Italy, he’s known as Giusto d’Alemagna and in this fresco of 1451 he brings a Franco-German style to Genoa.

Continue on through Castello and you’ll end up at its twelfth-century perimeter, still marked by the twin crenellated towers of the Porta Soprana, the main gate leading south to Rome. It was heavily restored in the Fascist era and is close by the location where some historical research suggests Christopher Columbus lived. There is no consensus on the biography of Genoa’s most famous son – some debate whether he was even born here at all – and neither is there any agreement about the historicity of the House of Christopher Columbus, rebuilt from a series of ruined buildings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Piazza De Ferrari, the heart of Genoa’s modern commercial district, and roughly the geographical centre of the city (photo: Belinda Fewings, Unsplash)

GENOA’S BAROQUE UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE

The modern-day city stretches between two railway stations: Genova Principe in the north, which leads to France, Turin and Milan, and Genova Brignole in the south, which leads down the coast to the Cinque Terre and on to Rome. In between these two landmarks, Via XX Settembre and Piazza De Ferrari mark out the comfortable, nineteenth-century boulevards of the city, with the most open spaces of the city and all the high-street shopping your heart could desire.

But continue north from Piazza De Ferrari on Via XXV Aprile and you will come to the zone of modern-day Via Garibaldi. Here, the boulevards narrow and the many prominent palaces take on a distinct baroque aspect. These are the Palazzi dei Rolli or “palaces of the rolls”, which from the seventeenth century were the official lodgings for high-ranking diplomats visiting Genoa.

The genesis of this system is fascinating: it has its origins in a late Renaissance ideal of the ‘perfect city’, one where neat town planning would strengthen the city’s moral fabric. Leading down the hill from today’s Via Garibaldi lies the ancient Maddalena neighbourhood, a maze of caruggi that has long been the city’s red light district – thus its name of “Magdalene”.

In the sixteenth century, the Republic of Genoa began to acquire land in the Maddalena, constructing a series of widened, rectilinear streets along the ridges of its hills. These were called the Strade Nuove or “new streets”, and they were parcelled up for aristocratic development.

The city’s highest-ranking councillors were incentivised to buy the land, and the grand baroque palaces that they constructed were assigned by the status of their Genoese owners to the ranks of visiting diplomats who they were required to host. So hand-in-hand with moral hygiene went a reinforcement of the Republic’s careful political and social hierarchies.

The Palazzi dei Rolli are now UNESCO World Heritage-listed, and they offer one of the best-preserved baroque streetscapes in Italy. Of the scores that survive, a series has been turned into a cumulative museum. Palazzo Rosso and Palazzo Bianco are our favourites, with the former offering works by van Dyck (who spent significant periods of time in the city), Veronese and Dürer. The latter offers superlative paintings by Gerard David and Memling, and a somewhat less interesting work by Caravaggio.

If you haven’t tried pesto in Genoa, did you even visit the city at all? (photo: Okeykat, Unsplash)

DRINKING & DINING: MARE E MONTI

Genoa is part of the Italian region of Liguria, a kind of Tyrrhenian cousin to the Adriatic region of Abruzzo. In other words, it’s the archetypal scenario of mare e monti, “surf and turf” – and you can expect to enjoy this geography when sampling Genoa’s signature cuisine, too.

Trees like olives, pencil pines, walnuts and chestnuts lend themselves to the shallow soil of the steep mountains that reach all the way down to Genoa itself. The local olive oil is highly prized, and pasta dressed with pesto al basilico from the mortal and pestle, the basil pesto that we’re all familiar with, tastes out of this world when you try it in the city of its birth.

Local pasta shapes, such as pansotti, might be offered with a walnut-based sauce (salsa di noci). The flours used in the dough could have a base of chestnut or even chickpea, such as in farinata, an unleavened chickpea flour pancake. Essentially, the mountain cuisine of Genoa reflects the lack of open fields for cultivating wheat or other intensive grains, but you won’t feel the poorer for it.

Meanwhile, the surf is showcased in Genoa’s numerous fish soups and stews, such as ciuppin and buridda, and the confusing capponada – it’s not made with capons, as its name might suggest, but is rather a seafood salad that involves a good measure of capperi (capers), another tenacious plant in the scrappy local soils.

Cappon magro is Genoa’s most lavish manifestation of the sea’s bounty: a pyramid-shaped cold salad that includes crackers, white fish, boiled vegetables, hard-boiled eggs, artichoke, tuna, capers and even lobster. Only for those with strong powers of digestion, perhaps!

Local desserts include pandolce, or the fruit cake that served the Genoese so well at sea – and castagnaccio, a chestnut-flour cake that is … an acquired taste. We prefer frisceu (apple fritters), pinolate (almond and pine nut biscuits) and gobeletti (jam tarts – and Genoa’s oldest sweet).

What should you wash all of this down with? Why, a white Vermentino from the Cinque Terre, the local DOC red Rossese di Dolceacqua, or even a highly perfumed passito or dessert wine from the Golfo del Tigullio. Salute!

San Fruttuoso abbey, a medieval hermitage a short boat ride - or longer hike - from the pretty fishing village of Camogli

GETTING OUT OF TOWN

Genoa is an engaging place, and you’ll easily want three full days to survey the sites (and shops) of the centro storico. But you could also jump on the Genova-Casella railway, one of the many funiculars and rack railways that brought workers into town after the city’s nineteenth-century industrialisation. The Casella track opened in 1929 and the line’s historic carriages still take you through 25km of beautiful scenery to the mountain village of Casella.

You could also take a local train down the Italian Riviera, to Recco (try the celebrated focaccia), Rapallo or on to the Cinque Terre. Here at Limelight Arts Travel, we’ve decided that we’ll only visit the colourful fishing villages of the Cinque Terre in the low season: the fragile environment just can’t handle the overtourism, and we invite you to time your visit carefully.

But only half an hour on a local train from Genoa will bring you to Camogli, another pretty fishing village that resembles those of the Cinque Terre. This one is full of buildings decorated in historic pastel-coloured murals, and it’s a lovely place for a stroll and a swim (there’s a public beach in the season), as well as a seafood lunch.

You can also take a boat from Camogli – or make a steep but beautiful hike of a few hours, over a densely-wooded mountain – to the Abbazia di San Fruttuoso, a spectacularly-sited medieval abbey in a remote wooded cove. Tours are offered by the Italian equivalent of the National Trust.

TURIN, GENOA
& THE FRENCH RIVIERA

Dates: 01-16 May 2025
Tour Leaders: Dr Kathleen Olive

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GUIDE TO GENOA