Genoa, or - as the people of Liguria called their republic - Zena, first appears to us from the highway through a series of concrete suburbs. The bus then makes its way past the giant port facilities until the driver finally tells us that we have arrived at our destination - Principe. That is the metro station, a little further on is the western railway station in a square of the same name. Perhaps I expected a scene that would be more similar to one of the verses of Eugenio Montale, the Nobel laureate born in this city. I remember that he wrote: My life as a wanderer is miserable. And I am happiest when I am wandering. And now that we arrive in his Genoa.
Our goal is the second train station in the east of the city. We waste no time. We go underground and take the only metro line in the city - Genoa is too hilly for another one - to reach the Brinjole train station.
We settle into a nice apartment near the station and immediately take the metro back. In a few minutes we'll be at the San Giorgio station. I can't wait to see Genoa, which the famous poet Petrarch called La Superba - the Superb.
We step out onto the square and are immediately confronted with the reasons why Genoa has been nicknamed in superlatives. The building fabric from the glorious centuries of the Genoese Republic is before us. And the port that once made Genoa one of the richest and most powerful cities in the world is behind us.
We hesitate a bit. City or port? City first.
We need to learn the first lesson - in Genoa, the old town area is so large and offers so many hidden gems that one has to stop at every corner. It is not the sweet beauty of the famous resorts. My companion says that Genoa is an old, self-confident lady, whose face has the patina of centuries. And the lady doesn't care what you think of her.
And we decided to act accordingly. We won't chase after sensations. We just walk around the city. We go deeper into the city center and we are already at the cathedral dedicated to Saint Lawrence - the Orthodox Church also celebrates him as Archdeacon Lawrence who was martyred in Rome under Emperor Valerian. The church began its life in the 12th century, it was only completed a few hundred years later, so it is a living textbook of the change of artistic eras. I was particularly impressed by the combinations of black and white materials. And a very cute lion.
We had plenty of time to enjoy the exterior of the church because on the first morning we sat opposite it and watched it from the street garden of a café, sipping a good macchiato. Then, what makes these gatherings unique began to happen. People were going to work, drinking espresso on their feet - this Italian custom has a simple reason, if you sit at a table, the drink is more expensive. Street vendors were sorting their goods. The Ligurian version of Italian weaves an acoustic network from all sides. And you feel that you are in the right place, that you would not want to be anywhere else but here. The charm of the old lady of Genoa begins to work.
We entered the cathedral. A mixture of strict harmony and playfulness. And the first association - the Imperial Cathedral in Aachen. Then I realize that Byzantine artists also wrote their sense of sacred order into these buildings. I find it amusing to think that in ancient times Istanbul - then Constantinople - was the common denominator of the buildings in Aachen and Genoa.
THE DOGE AND THE PAGANINI
A leisurely stroll takes us to the nearby Piazza Matteotti. There is the Doge's Palace, built in the 13th century. The Doge in the Republic of Genoa was a kind of elective duke, elected from a narrow circle of the most powerful families. For centuries, this was the headquarters of the strongest Mediterranean naval power. And then, for almost two centuries, the greatest European banking power.
Today it is a cultural center. Nearby is the Church of Jesus. Its altar is adorned with a painting by Rubens. The interior shows all the splendor of Baroque Genoa. In front of the church, farmers offer their goods. Sausages, cheese and - pesto Genoese. We usually see green pasta sauce in jars, in supermarkets. But here it is a product of home-made crafts.
I remember that we ordered this very dish at a restaurant at a highway rest stop, about half an hour before Genoa. We couldn't wait, so we tried the famous taste of Genoa in advance.
Behind the Doge's Palace is one of the most important city squares, named after Raffaello de Ferrari, a powerful 19th-century aristocrat. The square is home to the stock exchange, representative buildings, and banks. In front of the facade of the opera house, named after the ruler Carlo Felix of Sardinia, the Italian national hero Garibaldi on horseback shows the way.
The building was built in the first half of the 19th century and developed into one of the most important music houses in Italy. Genoa has a powerful musical tradition. And not only classical. Famous songs were created in the city's port. Without instrumental accompaniment, port workers sang them, giving vent to their suffering souls and bodies. This way of singing is called tralalero It exists to this day in the port district.
But Genoa is also associated with one of the most famous names in the history of world music - violinist, guitarist, composer Niccolo Paganini. He was born in Genoa in October 1782. Even as a child, he was able to elicit sounds from the violin that his contemporaries had never heard. Johann Wolfgang Goethe attended his concert. He was aware that Paganini was accompanied by the voice of the "devil's violinist". Goethe left a note about the positive result of demonic energy in Paganini: "Among artists, this appears more among musicians than among painters. In Paganini it is shown to a very great extent, which is why he produces such a great effect".
We stand before a statue of perhaps the most famous violinist since man picked up a bow. His hometown remembered him and erected this monument opposite the entrance to the opera. Yet, that house is named after a ruler, and the musician only got a sculpture. When our world turns these things around, we will be better off.
The Macini Gallery, named after the mastermind of Italian unification, is just a few steps away. We enter and are overwhelmed by the splendor of arcades in Paris or Milan. This is no coincidence. A century and a half ago, the Genoese had the opulent arcades of those cities in mind when they decided to build something similar.
Judging by the cafes, bookstores, bars and restaurants in the row, their venture paid off. The Liberty style, an American-Italian variant of Art Nouveau, still looks fresh here today.
The figure of Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and endings, sits with his two faces high above us, on large chandeliers. Genoa considers him its symbol. All the languages of the world that have adopted the Latin names of the months have immortalized Janus' name in the name of the month of January. I also notice the mighty cast-iron griffins - creatures with the body of a lion and the head and claws of an eagle. This gallery, which was the pride of the city, was paraded by the entire citizenry of previous generations. Its cafes served as intellectual salons of the time. Today, the annual book fair and a number of other events are held here.
COLUMBUS GLORY
We move away from the Gallery. First we pass by a mighty medieval gate with two towers that remind us of where the city border used to be - Porta soprana. It was one of the three city gates. Right next to it is a house that is haunted by tourists. It is not of any architectural significance, but it is of exceptional historical value. If what Genoa claims is true - that a man grew up in that house who, on behalf of the Spanish king, but with the money of Genoese bankers, discovered a previously unknown continent.
Christopher Columbus was born in 1452 in Genoa. He lived in this house from the age of three and spent 15 years of his life there. Earlier generations didn't have much sense for history, so the ground floor and first floor of the house, which was much larger, were overgrown with ivy. Now there is a museum that commemorates the most famous navigator that Genoa produced - and it produced many. Columbus did not know until the end of his life that he had discovered a new continent, thinking that he had found a water route to India. A man who was born just two years after him in Florence, and who outlived him by six years, was the first to realize this - Amerigo Vespucci. America was named after him. "Oh, my Columbus," I think. "Columbia would be a nicer name for that continent."
From there we walked towards Brignoli station. And inevitably we came across another petrified sign on the face of the city, which yearned for glory. The architect Marcello Piacentini experienced his rise during the time of Mussolini. For a long time he had the status of the first architect of fascist Italy.
The Genoese planned a monument to the Italians who fell in World War I as early as 1923. According to the logic of time and aesthetics, this monument had to be a kind of triumphal arch.
And here we are in front of her.
Anyone who thinks that serving tyrants is dishonorable is right. But even the Pope's entourage was not disgusted by Piacenti's plans from 1936 to build an access road to St. Peter's Basilica. All of this was realized in Rome in 1950, when Piacenti's patron, the Duce, was long dead.
The combination of ancient Roman and Renaissance, with a touch of monumentalism, may have been intended to make a monument for the dead grand. But - intentionally or not - it made the living small and insignificant.
LIGHTHOUSE AND PALACES
The next day we decided to walk two significant streets - Via Garibaldi and Via Balbi. The Renaissance palaces in a row are simply astonishing. How much formative harmony, behind which stand resources - money and aesthetic will. The generations that built this have left a legacy for their descendants.
This is immediately clear as soon as you step into Garibaldi Street. A tour of all the palaces would take days, even weeks. In the Town Hall, which is housed in a Renaissance building, visitors can admire it up close.
Just listing all the palaces would be quite tiring. And each one has its own unique story. In Via Balbi we stop at a cafe opposite the university to have a drink and take a break in the shade. The day is hot.
We are refreshed by coffee and delicious orange juice in the back courtyard of the café. There is no one there except for a student leafing through a book. The Internet knows everything, including how old the University of Genoa is. It was founded by a papal bull in 1471. Its history has followed the rise of Genoa. But that is only the date when the current state of affairs was made official. The city already had law, medicine, theology and art academies in the 13th century.
Edoardo Sanguinetti, poet, connoisseur of Dante and Brecht, leftist who led the famous polemic with Pasolini on the tasks of art, is a child of this university. “You are my book, old love: I have read your spine, the skin on your wrists: I have translated the sound of your yawns…”, says Sanguinetti. He has not been with us since 2010, a man who learned a lot about literature in this city, in this place.
The woman to whom Sanguinetti dedicated the poem Radio-sonnet is probably not alive. But here, the verses live. That remains. And the melancholy of magnificent Renaissance courtyards.
We are exhausted from so many palaces. It is time for a snack. We settle into a restaurant whose garden borders the elevator that leads to the hill. This is another peculiarity of Genoa. In several places in the city, the lower and upper parts are connected by elevators or cable cars. Genoa is simply too big for the terrain it is given between the sea and the rocky slopes of the mountains. After lunch, we set off on this strange transport to the viewpoint. First, the cabin travels through a tunnel straight into the hill. Then it is hooked onto a turntable and the cables pull it like an elevator through a vertical tunnel.
At the top, D'Albertis Castle awaits us. It is named after the sailor who invested his fortune in building the neo-Gothic castle. In it, he placed all the interesting, even bizarre, objects he brought back from his travels.
From a viewpoint in the manicured garden, one can see the most recognizable symbol of Genoa - the lighthouse.
Its predecessor has stood on the same spot since the 12th century. After being damaged and demolished in wars, it was rebuilt in this form in the 16th century. Genoa has two football clubs. They also have a kind of “eternal derby”. Sports journalists in Italy call it the “derby under the lantern”, that is, under the lighthouse.
PORTO ANTICO AND THE ENDLESS LABYRINTH
Only in the early 1990s was the former industrial port transformed into a recreational area used by both residents and tourists. Genoa had already gone through difficult decades of restructuring. The port industry was no longer competitive. The city lost several hundred thousand inhabitants. The reorientation towards service industries took decades.
We came to the end. The large aquarium in the port is one of the most visited in the Mediterranean. There are restaurants everywhere. But what I liked the most was the glass ball, which stands out from everything around it in shape and material.
The author of the building called Biosphere is the world-famous architect Renzo Piano - born in Genoa. I remember his buildings, the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Nemo Science Museum in Amsterdam, the department store in Cologne or the office building on Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. I would add to that series of buildings this one in the form of a glass ball floating on water, home to tropical plants and animals.
Anyone who wants to describe her, the charming old lady of Genoa gives her a hard time. She has countless faces. Little churches that are silent in the hustle and bustle. A row of shops with deacons, greengrocers with black-skinned vendors. Cherries cheaper than those in Serbia. A chatty waiter who brings us appetizers with wine - salami, cheese, bread. That is included in the price of a glass of wine. Or another waiter who brings us coffee half the price of the one in Belgrade. A walk down Galata Street, which descends like a slide towards Columbus Square. We spent two evenings there. And we fell in love with that area.
And I remember the Galata Tower in Istanbul, which was a quarter of Genoese merchants for hundreds of years. "Kalata" in Ligurian means - steps. The climb to the tower in Istanbul is similar to that in some parts of Genoa.
There are many streets that could not be described, but they deserve it. Genoa has the magic of Palermo and Lisbon. Something proto-Italian. And something all its own.
I haven't even mentioned the exhibition of an artist in the baroque church near the Principe station. Or the happy morning moments in the cafeteria near the port. Divine tiramisu in a place on Raveka Street. Pastries and coffee in a nice station cafe before leaving Genoa for Sanremo. The baroque ceiling gave the railway bistro a sublime look.
It was early afternoon. We asked for a cappuccino. The bartender and waiter exchanged ironic remarks, but they made the drink. I know that in Italy you don't order a cappuccino after noon. But we have the bonus of tourist barbarians.
On the train, as the suburbs pass by outside the window, I read the poem “Genoa Saudade & Spleen” by the local poet Claudio Pozzani: “Genoa is a cannibalistic plant with a throat of scum that swallows mothers with their bags”. This is true, I have seen this. The line also catches my eye: “Genoa, samba of the waves”. Pozzani says at the end: “I observe the tower that no one visits and knows, between the first and second tears, from my salty window”.
That poet's Genoese sadness follows me on the train all the way to Sanremo.
Bonus video:
