Logbook from a City for True Travellers: a Weekend in Genoa - Part One

A wonderful natural amphitheatre overlooking the most important port in Italy and welcoming the traveller with a breathtaking spectacle of colourful houses, sea, heights, steep creuze that brush against ancient chapels, sumptuous palaces, boats and ships from every corner of the world: here is a first image of Genoa, historically known as “La Superba”, for eight centuries the heart of a powerful maritime republic and today an important city of art and a destination for international tourists and families looking for a holiday full of stimulation and fun, even for children. Arriving here, especially from the plain wrapped in fog or from some city immersed in winter smog, is like a blast of light, warmth and poetry. A single ray of sun is enough and the colourful houses light up like so many pieces of a rainbow, flooding the spirits with an extraordinary vitality.

A vitality sometimes “stubborn and contrary” as Fabrizio De André sang, a strength of spirit that in the past was needed to challenge the sea, and today has served to rise again after the destruction brought by the rivers.

We arrive in Genoa about a month after the flood of October 2014 and it seems a miracle to find a city returned in a very short time to its usual splendour thanks to the courage and commitment of its citizens. “The rice cake is not finished,” Stefano Di Bert, chef of the Antica Hostaria Pacetti in Borgo Incrociati, one of the hardest-hit neighbourhoods, sums up the situation ironically, as if to say that despite everything, the Genoese have not lost their smile and are ready to start again.

Departing, restarting, setting sail for new destinations, building new palaces and opening new roads for the future: these could be the keywords of our Genoese weekend during which we follow Christopher Columbus in the discovery of America, climb aboard a galley to discover that the life of galley slaves was much worse than one could imagine, end up shipwrecked on a lifeboat at the mercy of the waves of the stormy ocean at Cape Horn and set sail towards “La Merica” with the Italian emigrants of the early twentieth century in search of a better life.

From the exciting interactive exhibitions of the Galata Museo del Mare, the largest maritime museum in the Mediterranean, the journey takes us to the Tropics, but also to Antarctica, passing through the depths of the Mediterranean Sea and the colours of the coral reef, thanks to no fewer than fifteen thousand curious animals including fish, marine mammals, reptiles, amphibians and birds that we can admire in the seventy tanks of the Aquarium. Not only that: the new Cetaceans Pavilion, designed by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, can host up to nine animals in four different tanks, to be observed through a visit on two levels: both from above and from an underwater perspective.

It is one of the largest biodiversity exhibitions in Europe, a scientific word that here translates into an enchanted world populated by polka-dot seals swimming very fast, by penguins that between one dive and another smile at us from the icy rocks, by cheerful dolphins, by unsettling jellyfish, by little fish that seem to have come out of a kaleidoscope and even by a thoughtful caiman capable of staying motionless for hours reflecting on the great questions of life.

In the spectacular Porto Antico, redesigned in 1992 by Renzo Piano who created an area rich in leisure attractions, the journey of little and big explorers continues at the National Antarctic Museum, where you can learn about the life of the researchers of the Italian base at the South Pole, while at the Città dei bambini e dei ragazzi, the largest structure in Italy dedicated to themes such as play, science and technology for children, you can make many exciting discoveries. Genoa itself is also a fantastic place to explore, and to start doing so you just need to climb onto the Bigo, the panoramic lift from whose round cabin, equipped with an audio system that illustrates the beauties of the city in four languages, you admire a unique panorama.

In the Superb even the lifts are special: with the one connecting piazza Portello with the Castelletto district, according to the poet Giorgio Caproni, you even arrive in Paradise. The poet wrote, in fact: “When I have made up my mind to go there, I will go to Paradise by the Castelletto lift.” Caproni did not exaggerate at all: the broad panoramic view of the city that opens up from the Belvedere Luigi Montaldo is, to all intents and purposes, heavenly.

From the Porto Antico, crossing piazza Caricamento and skirting Palazzo San Giorgio, we reach the Sottoripa, where the oldest public porticoes in Italy are found, built between 1125 and 1133. We also venture into the caruggi of the ancient medieval quarter, discovering some of the thirty historic shops recognised by the Superintendency that preserve the city's tradition of quality trade and craftsmanship. These are craft businesses and spaces for creativity, including historic pastry shops crammed with tasty sweet treats in a thousand colours such as candied fruit – the only way for sailors to eat fruit – or the marron glacé of the Pasticceria Romanengo or the Pasticceria Villa di Profumo.

The circuit also includes the Casana tripe shop from the early twentieth century where dockers used to have breakfast, or the Antica Polleria Aresu where the furnishings, including the cold rooms made from the old ice houses, date back to 1910. “We even have a hand-cranked telephone,” joke the owners before showing us another gem: “the Holy Grail of poulterers”, that is, a cylindrical egg candler, a tool once lit with a candle, used to determine the degree of freshness of eggs.

Walking along via San Lorenzo, we reach the Cathedral of the same name, built on the spot where, according to legend, Saint Lawrence and Pope Sixtus II, on their way to Spain, were hosted in a house. After the saint's killing, a chapel arose in the area and then a small church in his memory, while the splendid cathedral, with its facade of white and black stripes in typical Ligurian style, was consecrated in 1118, with the works not yet completed. In reality the religious building remained unfinished: according to the original project it should have had two bell towers, but due to the death of the architect, the left one was never completed. Inside the three-nave church you can admire numerous wonderful frescoes and other works of art from every era.

Continuing up the slope we reach Porta Soprana, which in the Middle Ages was the main gateway to the city. A few metres from its two elegant towers, we visit the house-museum of Christopher Columbus, within whose walls the future navigator lived in his youth, between 1455 and 1470. We are told that the modest house, probably destroyed during the bombing of Genoa in 1684 by the Sun King, was rebuilt in the eighteenth century.

The construction of the splendid Palazzo Ducale, once the seat of government and the residence of the Doge of the Republic, restored for the Colombiadi of 1992 and today hosting art exhibitions of great importance, is instead linked to important Genoese military victories (against Pisa in 1284 and against Venice in 1298).