En route to Cinque Terre, Portofino, or other seductive Ligurian destinations, travelers usually bypass this ancient city by the sea. Why does no one go to Genova?
We have checked into Locanda di Palazzo Cicala, across a small piazza from the black-banded façade of Cattedrale San Lorenzo. Our room feels loft-like and airy, simple, too: tall windows, white sofa and chairs, and two huge beds, also dressed all in white. I hardly can stir myself to go out; this is a perfect place to read and plan. Ed, frowning at a map, says, “Prepare to be lost,” and out we go.
We’re near a zone of butchers, produce stands, and cramped shops selling olive oil, lentils, legumes, and slabs of dried cod. At one frutta e verdure, I see a scrawled sign: Le signore che palpano la frutta saranno sottoposte allo stesso trattamento da parte del fruttivendolo. The women who palpate the fruit will be subjected to the same treatment on the part of the fruit seller.
We’re starving. A tiny trattoria lures us in for a feast of chickpea fritters, grilled vegetables, and branzino, sea bass, with lemon. Wine at lunch contributes to read-away-the-afternoons, but today we share a carafe of effervescent house white.
THE CENTRO STORICO, historic center, quickly overwhelms us—a warren of narrow lanes called caruggi. They twist, turn, dead-end, branch. A maze! Each is lined with shops of claustrophobic density and heavy aromas, bins of clothing, musical instruments, bolts of African cloth, and button and ribbon displays. Albanese, African, Romanian, and Arabic voices ring out, music spills into the streets, and shoppers push into fishmongers, stalls selling plastic housewares from China, shoe repair shops, tailors, and brightly lit stores gleaming with cheap watches and electronics. Not like Naples, not like Palermo: I’m in a souk! This is the largest medieval center in Europe. We’re lost and might as well like it. At least there’s no traffic, only the zing-zing of bicycle bells.
WE SURGE INTO a lather of old-world cafés with bentwood chairs and painted ceilings, hip new cafés serving green juices and French-looking pastries. Art galleries—I’ve never seen as many anywhere. The fast food tempts me at Antica Sciamadda and Antica Sà Pesta, specializing in tasty torte, a thick pastry filled with cheese and chard or other vegetables, and farinata, huge golden moons of chickpea batter poured onto a metal disk and run into a hot pizza oven. How can anything this simple be so good? Take it and go. How many focaccia, pastry, and snack shops? Hundreds!
We’re drawn to Pietro Romanengo fu Stefano, where they’ve made chocolates since 1780. Glass and wood cabinets could as well be displaying emerald brooches and diamond necklaces. The two women meting out these treasures, though, are as serious as if they’re serving subpoenas. Even Ed’s enthusiasm cannot elicit a smile. He selects candied nespoli (loquats), sugared lemon and orange peels, marron glacé, and dark chocolates. We walk out, untying the box before we’ve closed the door.
Uphill, down to a glimpse of water, radiating streets, a scary lane with drunks leaning on walls and prostitutes hanging out of doors and windows. Dark alleys, slices of bright sunlight. Sun-baked, wiry men from Morocco, paler ones from eastern Europe, exceptionally tall Africans, veiled women, and others wrapped in bright prints. Wash hanging on racks. This is a raucous port where you don’t know what to expect where, or when. Even the Italian sounds foreign, a clattering dialect harsher than the more rhythmic Tuscan we’re used to.
I RESERVE A table at La Forchetta Curiosa. Atmospheric, full of regulars who’re greeting the owner with hugs, this is the true-blue cozy osteria. Wild salad greens with squid, linguine with broccoli and anchovies, rolled branzino with pistachios—and what’s that: totani ripieni di boraggine e crema di patate al limone? Calamari stuffed with borage, lemon, and potatoes. That’s for Ed, no doubt.
I’m surprised to see cappon magro on the menu. I translate this as lean capon but when the waiter sets one down on an adjacent table, I see that it’s more interesting than a skinny chicken. Magro refers to Catholic days without meat. Cappon mocks the chickens the rich were enjoying, while fishermen’s families made do with what the sea offered. Pieces of hardtack are soaked in salted water and vinegar, then layered into a pyramid with seafood, olives, vegetables, and eggs. Often topped with a lobster, it’s served with caper and anchovy sauce. The genius of la cucina povera.
I decide on ravioli with pesto and creamed potato. Are babies of Liguria fed a tiny spoon of pesto for their first non-milk meal? Is it the most enduring memory of family feasts? I don’t want pesto often, but in Liguria, it’s unctuous and fresh. I’ll have some of everything, please.
Perusing the desserts, Ed says, “What is caglio?”
“Let’s ask.” And so, we get to meet caglio, aka prescinseua, aka quagliata. The owner gives us the story: a soft, somewhat acidic local cheese, not easy to find, as it is perishable and production is small. It’s made from milk of cows grazing for centuries in the hills above Camogli.
“Is it only for desserts?” Santa Madonna, no. It has been used by Genovese on focaccia, in fillings of vegetable torte, in nut sauces for pasta, in pesto, stuffed inside vegetable fritters, and baked with anchovies. The owner serves a white bowl of bright berry sauce over what looks like ricotta or buratta. Tart berries and the slightly sour cheese remind me that Italian desserts often shock with their faint sweetness. A happy end, memorable place, memorable dinner.
AS WE WALK around town, we check menus posted outside restaurants. Seeing ingredients not usually on Italian menus—ginger, saffron, mustard, and curry—reminds me of the far ports reached by Ligurian trading ships. A window display of patterned cotton draws me into Deca. I meet Gabriella, who tells me that her hand-printed cotton bedspreads and tablecloths are called mezzari. The word comes from the Arab mizar, meaning to hide or cover. Gabriella shows me the carved wooden stamps used to ink the designs. Imported into Genova from India in the 1600s, mezarri became fashionable among noblewomen, who wore the fanciful designs as mantillas and wraps. As silk later became available, the rich abandoned the mezzari and the cloth was taken up by lower classes, eventually becoming part of the folk clothing of Genova. Women wore the prints as shawls. The designs (especially the tree of life, with branches, exotic animals, and fruits) were believed to bring luck to brides. Workers and sailors, she tells us, wore cotton workpants dyed the bleu de Gênes, blue jeans. This “blue of Genova” came from indigo plantations in India. I buy three mezarri for summer parties under the pergola. When I set my table at Bramasole, I will remember the women of Genova.
ED AND I walk down to the sprawling Antico Porto, recently revived under the auspices of native son, architect Renzo Piano. He’s designed Il Bigo, a giant white derrick that raises you up for a view of the harbor. It mimics working cranes of the port. His, too, is the famous aquarium that draws all the schoolchildren of Italy, and a hands-on science museum. In a revised cotton warehouse, we find a bookstore and Eataly, a good place to slow down and browse the plethora of Italian foods. The elaborately boxed panettone for Christmas are arriving, at least a hundred brands of this traditional brioche-type bread dotted with raisins and candied fruit.
This is the first sighting of other November tourists. A few Dutch and English people are eating focaccia and pizza, or stocking up on risotto, olive oil, and jars of pesto. At the far end of the warehouse, we find a table at Il Marin, with a panoramic view. Everything is perfection. I get to try the classic Ligurian tortelli with pesto, green beans, and potatoes. Ed prefers raw fish, and lobster with endive. The menu is adventurous: frog with Jerusalem artichokes, finanziera dal mare, a dish made with the quinto quarto of fish. Quinto quarto, the fifth quarter, usually refers to meat offal, specifically what’s left after the prime cuts. I assume this fish dish contains the heads and other usually discarded bits. Ed is attracted to the scallops with little green beans and something called taccole. He tells me, “The word translates as ‘jackdaw.’ ”
“Surely not. That’s some kind of crow.” But after quinto quarto of fish, I’m ready to believe anything.
GENOVA IS UNLIKE any other European city. Spokes from here wheel around the Mediterranean and beyond. They lived like kings and queens, those merchants of the seas, in opulent palazzi lining Strada Nuova. Who decided in the sixteenth century that they would all build along a new street? “Who’s frescoing your house?” must have been the aperitivo banter of the time. The area around what is now via Garibaldi was Europe’s first housing development. Fact: One hundred and fifty palazzi remain; forty-two are designated UNESCO World Heritage sites.
Pietro Paolo Rubens, as the Flemish painter signed himself while in Italy, painted the palazzo builders, the Genovese nobility, portraits that fascinate me more for the splendid clothing worn by the subjects than for the sometimes pinched and ordinary faces. Rubens became fascinated with palazzo architecture when he lived in Genova. I have the volume he published in 1622, Palazzi di Genova, drawings (not his) that record floor plans, room uses, gardens, and elevations of the most important homes—those owned by the rolli, first families listed on the city’s “rolls.” He intended his publication to be a source of inspiration to architects in the rest of Europe. He admired the style of a “perfect cube” and a central living room. By the time a second volume was printed, grand squares had been superseded by rectangles with courtyards.
I’m glad I read this book before coming to Genova; I had acquaintance with the floor plans, their niches, friezes, marble balconies, trompe-l’oeil loggias, balustrades, and sculptures—the architecture that reveals how a life is lived. The grand palazzi provide, too, a contrast with the crowded, serpentine clusters of housing for the hoi polloi in the medieval centro. (I wonder, where would I have lived? Oh, perhaps in a stone cottage on the shore.)
Is there a book on the frescoes of Genova? The houses were decorated, not usually with predominant religious subjects but with maps, battles, and mythological themes. The owners also collected art, and not just Italian art. An astonishing patrimony accumulated in the palazzi. Visiting dignitaries, popes, and princes would stay in someone’s palace. Each had a grade, like Michelin stars; the more important the visitor, the fancier the accommodations assigned by the government. Imagine a courier dropping off a note: You’ll be entertaining the king of Spain’s third cousin for two months.
Some of the palazzi have become apartments; many are schools or part of the university, others are banks. Some are residences still belonging to the last of the nobility. Many are open to visitors. First, we visit Palazzo Rosso, then Palazzo Bianco, overwhelmed in both by the richness of the art, then Palazzo Tursi, one of Italy’s most treasured.
Have I used the word overwhelmed several times? A recurring word for how I feel in Genova, especially after entering Palazzo Rosso: six floors of opulent living space and paintings. The sixth floor opens onto a walled roof where you can see the sweep of Genova to the sea. The art—Van Dyck, Veronese, Dürer, Ribera, Tiziano (Titian), Lotto, and many Genovese masters I’ve never known before. One is Andrea Sacchi, whose Daedalus and Icarus captures a fraught and tender moment as Daedalus is tying wax wings on Icarus’s slender body. At this moment neither of them knows how it will end. A dreary underlying message: Don’t reach for the sun. How regarded must have been Gregorio De Ferrari and Domenico Piola, who painted the four ceiling frescoes in the rooms named for each season. It would be nice, wouldn’t it, to have a winter room, a spring room, others for summer and fall. Looking at De Ferrari’s work, I’m not surprised to learn that when he worked in Parma he copied Correggio’s frescoes. They share the style of dynamic, floating forms and bold color. Piola was top-tier in Genova for the last half of the 1600s. Such immense fame, now faded. Palazzo Rosso was bombed in World War Two, as were many historic places in Genova. The restoration is seamless.
THE ART IS even more compelling in Palazzo Bianco: Rubens, Zurbarán, Memling, Cranach the Elder, Van Cleve, Brueghel. Bounty from the noble bankers and canny sea-traders, all of whom seem to have been enchanted with art. Two of my favorite Italians are here, too: Pontormo and Filippino Lippi. Most magnetic, however, is Caravaggio’s Ecce Homo, Behold the Man. Dark, like all Caravaggios, except for the vulnerable torso of Christ, whose naked chest is bathed in a luminous, buttery light. He looks not at all transcendent this moment after being crowned with thorns. Downcast eyes, thin frame, his suffering private. The torturer’s expression haunts me with its ambiguous mix of pity and enjoyment. The face of Pilate is thought to be a Caravaggio self-portrait. I hope not. It’s awful to think he might put his face onto that ironic, cruel character.
ART SATURATES ME quickly. Four hours, I’m done.
OUR ROOM IS a haven. High ceilings lift the spirit. Ed is reading about Renzo Piano. If only we could invite him to dinner! I’m reading the trusty Blue Guide to Liguria, then about Charles Dickens’s sojourn here. “Beautiful confusion,” he noted. When I fall into a nap, the iPad crashes to the floor. A hazard books don’t share.
BY THE MORNING of the third day, it’s clear that we are not going to see nearly all of Genova. This city needs you for a week, at least. We are not going to visit the aquarium, nor Piano’s biosphere of tropical plants, nor the Galata Museo’s history of seafaring exhibits. We are not going to climb to the top of La Lanterna, the second-oldest lighthouse in Europe, and we won’t be able to see the residential neighborhoods on the sea. I am especially sorry we can’t get to the cemetery of Sant’Ilario in the near-suburb of Nervi. Its nineteenth-century sculpture of mourning was on my list, as was an architectural attraction in another cemetery: Carlo Scarpa’s tombs for the Galli family. (Ed doesn’t share my interest in how the dead are buried. But what else is more revealing about a culture?) As the list of what remains to be seen lengthens, the desire to return takes root. When?
AT THE ERSATZ house of Christopher Columbus, a busload of German tourists crowds the entrance. Believe this was his home and you also can believe that Juliet’s balcony survives in Verona. But this may well be the right area; Columbus’s father is said to have been the gatekeeper at Porta Soprana, the entrance between two sculptural round towers in the fortified walls built in 1155. Turning away from the modest hovel, what we find nearby is the delicate cloister of Sant’Andrea, untended and unvisited, a haunting outline of delicate columns surrounding a weedy center. No trace of the original church remains but the cloister feels holy.
AS WE WALK, walk, and walk, we stop into various churches—and there are many. All the rolli families buried themselves grandly. Most are elaborate and dark: Ashen air hangs like cobwebs from high windows where light bursts in. By the time you’ve been in Genova a few days, you’re familiar with the names of local gentry; Doria, Pallavicino, Grimaldi, Spinola, Adorno, Brignole Sale are carved on palazzi, tombs, monuments, and plaques. The harmonious Piazza San Matteo memorializes the powerful Doria dynasty with a black-and-white banded church surrounded by several palazzi. The black and white signifies importance in the city; not just anyone was allowed that distinctive design. In Genova’s major church, dedicated to San Lorenzo, you come upon the Grimaldi and Fieschi tombs. San Lorenzo isn’t Genova’s patron saint (that’s John the Baptist) but he gets top billing anyway. Above the receding striped columns of the major portal, there Lorenzo lies on a grill, enduring his martyrdom. (Yes, patron saint of chefs.) At either end, two small figures appear to be ramping up the heat with anvils.
San Lorenzo has been a cathedral since 1006 and fate since has brought a series of revisions. Major construction took place from 1118 until 1130: Romanesque, with interruptions of French Gothic. How impossible to absorb the church’s wealth of symbols, didactic programs, ornaments, and iconography. But the religious bookstore, Libreria San Paolo, on the same piazza, gets me started with a brochure called “Cathedral of Saint Laurence.” I spend a morning with this. I am thinking of something Margaret Visser wrote about another church in her brilliant book, The Geometry of Love: “Meaning is intentional: this building has been made in order to communicate with the people in it…The building is trying to speak; not listening to what it has to say is a form of barbarous inattention, like admiring a musical instrument while caring nothing for music.”
Inside, I find paintings of San Lorenzo’s life, including one by local artist Giovanni Andrea Ansaldo. San Lorenzo restores sight to Lucillus, an imprisoned blind pagan. Especially bountiful are the many paintings of the Virgin Mary, capturing tender moments as when she holds the Child and John the Baptist leans over and kisses the tiny foot. Endless repetitions of religious images can engender numbness in the brain, but now and again, such as now, one makes you feel washed clean. Wandering this cabinet of curiosities, I love getting to know artists I was unaware of: Luca Cambiaso, Giovanni Battista Castello (Il Bergamasco), Domenico Fiasella, Giovanni Battista Paggi. Genova! What astonishing flowering over a long period of time.
The word overwhelming comes to mind again. From Byzantine frescoes to a crystal plate from the Last Supper—such a heritage. Who would expect to see a blue dish that held the head of John the Baptist, and an unexploded bomb that hit the church in World War Two?
ON THE EDGE of the centro storico, we walk into the shock of Piazza de Ferrari—a grand fountain, vast open space (sky!), opera house, arcaded shops, cafés, and the enormous Palazzo Ducale. Developed in 1870, after the unification of Italy, this area is where Genova joins the modern world. Cars, taxis, buses! Busy via XX Settembre branches off from here, a long street of small shops and the Mercato Orientale, which would drive even the most reluctant cook to the kitchen. The “Eastern” market is one of the greatest markets in Italy, a two-story structure packed with everything that swims in the sea, cheeses, armfuls of basil, meats. Mounds of endive, Jerusalem artichokes, primitive red radicchio with twisting white ribs that look plucked from under water, escarole, dozens of lettuce—all prove the appeal of the autumn kitchen. Worth bringing home: bags of dried porcini mushrooms and pine nuts.
The grand bazaar—you can’t help but photograph piles of broccolo romano, tangerines, radishes, and black cabbage. Squid, fish flashing iridescent under the lights, slick calamari, cockles, mussels, alive ho! Although there are artichokes up from the south, missing this time of year are the coveted thorny, sweet, and tender artichokes of Albenga in Liguria. (We must come back in March.) We buy a few annurca, not local but brought in from Campania in the south. These apples are harvested when green; they can’t ripen if left unpicked. Because of short stems, they drop off. They’re set out on straw or hemp to ripen, and must be turned every few days. Ripe, they’re rosy and round, and smell like apple essence.
GENOVESE EAT WELL. Their food is fresh and true-to-source. I make a list of favorites from pasticcherie (pastry shops) and cafés so far:
Almond panna cotta
Tortina di patate e gorgonzola, a little potato and Gorgonzola tart
Chocolate and orange tart
Shellfish salad with puntarelle (a bitter, wild green)
Salad of shaved raw artichokes with bresaola and Parmigiano
Torta of rice and saffron
Torta of escarole
WE FIND LA Buca di San Matteo, near the Doria complex. “Ah, a date-night restaurant,” I say, slipping off my jacket. Softly lit, high-backed upholstered chairs, a place for intimate conversation. For a few minutes, we pretend we are meeting secretly, he down from Milan, me in from Florence. A torrid evening ahead. But soon we fall to discussing what we will choose from the tempting menu. We share an order of very light pansoti (like ravioli) with rich walnut sauce, then Ed lights on the tuna with grilled polenta and I opt for chickpea purée with grilled shrimp.
We’ve missed as much as we’ve seen. At least we have eaten our way across the city. We can’t possibly order dessert tonight but we do—who could turn away from creamy zabaglione semifreddo with a crunch of chocolate and hazelnut brittle? And we might as well taste the chestnut mousse flavored with orange as we polish off a liter of house wine.
AT ALL HOURS, as we come and go from our hotel, a violinist stands before the great portal of San Lorenzo. He’s good. He sends his music as a gift into the air of the ancient piazza. I think of his parents. All those music lessons, all the hope. And this is where he plays by heart—with exuberance and joy. We leave euros in his instrument case and he nods. We nod back. Grazie per la musica!