Genova | Above the Port
A week in the carruggi, and the Italian city that belongs to the Mediterranean before it belongs to Italy
We drove into Genova on the A12 from Versilia, two hours of motorway tunnels punched through the Apennines and then a long descent through the cuttings and viaducts the road takes to drop a coastal city out of a mountain wall. The first thing you see from the autostrada, before you see the city, is the port, which is the largest container facility on the Italian Mediterranean and which lies below the city like a long grey hand. The city sits on the cliff above the hand. You take an exit, you spiral down through a sequence of overpasses and underpasses that Genova is famous for, and you arrive at the seam between the elevated road and the old port, which is one of the strangest urban geographies in this country.
We had been told not to come. Our friends in Verona had said don’t. Our Tuscan friends had said don’t, some of them with a shrug, which I have learned in Italy is the difference between a warning and an opinion. The reputation was specific and consistent. Genova was rough. Genova was not safe. The carruggi, the old alleys of the historic core, had been full of dealers and street workers a few years ago, which in Italian conversation amounts to the same thing as last week. The port was poor in the run-down sense, not the romantic sense. There was nothing to see. Even the international flights skipped the Cristoforo Colombo airport in favor of Milan, Florence, Pisa, or Nice across the border, which was why we had never met a tourist who had been to Genova on purpose. The city was, in the small Italian consensus of our friends, the place you went to take a ferry from, the way Livorno was the place you went to take a ferry from, except Livorno at least had a love story and Genova did not.
This is the part that surprised me. The same friends will tell you the same thing about Naples. Naples is rough, they say, Naples is hard, Naples is unfiltered, but Naples has style, Naples has charm, you can fall in love with Naples in three days, you should go, be careful. Genova does not get that exemption. Genova gets the warning without the love letter. After the third or fourth time we heard this, Sophia and I stopped asking and got curious.
The city was two hours from where we live in Pietrasanta, just past the line where we draw the day trip, and the way to settle it was to sleep there. So we did. A week, two Airbnbs, one slow change of neighborhood in the middle, both of them above the port, in the dense old city our friends had named with such specific concern. God, it was such a good decision not to skip, we have been returning ever since.
The carruggi are the part you have to start with, because nothing else in Italy looks like them. Most of them are in the Maddalena area. The streets are stone canyons. They are wide enough for one of the small three-wheeled vans the Italians use to move heavy things through places cars cannot fit, and not always wide enough for that. The buildings on either side are six and seven stories tall, leaning very slightly toward each other above your head, so the strip of sky you can see while looking up is the thickness of a finger. The light at street level is dim even at noon. Laundry hangs on lines strung between windows on opposite buildings, four stories up. The doors at street level are small and low. There is a smell of focaccia coming out of a bakery here, a salumi shop window there, a kebab place in the next alley, an Indian restaurant in the alley after that, a corner shrine to the Madonna with an electric candle still burning in front of a faded fresco. The Genovese walk through all of it without slowing down, in the practiced manner of people who live in a labyrinth.
The closest thing I have ever seen to this is the Spanish Quarter in Naples, which is calmer. The next closest is the medina of a Moroccan town I once spent a long week in, and it was surprisingly cleaner. The carruggi are rougher than either, and at the same time they are the densest medieval city center in Europe, with more than a hundred hectares of essentially intact fourteenth-century street layout, the kind of urban fabric that survives only in places where no one ever got rich enough at the right moment to tear it down for boulevards. Paris did that in the nineteenth century. Florence did it earlier. Rome has been doing it for two thousand years and is still at it. Genova did not. The money in Genova, when it came, did not go into knocking the medieval city down to make wider streets for the carriages of the new merchants. It went somewhere else. Where it went is the surprise.
If you climb out of the carruggi toward the north, you arrive in three or four minutes at a wide, paved walking street called Via Garibaldi, and you have stepped into a different city. Via Garibaldi is the showpiece street of the patrician families of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Four-story Renaissance and Baroque palazzi line both sides of it. The facades are clean. The interiors hold collections by Van Dyck, Rubens, and Caravaggio. The street was deliberately built in the 1550s as the new address for the families who had grown too important for the carruggi, the Spinola and the Doria and the Pallavicini and the rest, and they put up palaces there as fast as they could afford them, which was very fast, because the Republic of Genova at that exact moment was the bank of the Spanish Empire and the money was coming in from the New World every week.
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What they did with the palaces is the part I find astonishing. The Republic of Genova did not believe in spending public money on hosting visiting dignitaries. So it made a list, called a rollo, of the families whose palaces were grand enough to host a head of state. When a foreign ambassador, prince, cardinal, or king arrived in the city, a public lottery was drawn, and the winning family got the honor and the bill. Their palace became, for the duration of the state visit, the official lodging of the Republic. The state showed off, the family paid for it. The system ran until Napoleon ended the Republic in 1797. The forty-two palaces still standing along Via Garibaldi and a few neighboring streets are now a UNESCO site, and most of them are open as museums or used as banks and government offices, which is what happens to private hospitality when the private parties stop being able to afford it.
The lesson of Via Garibaldi is the same lesson you read in the carruggi one street below. The Genovese, then and now, do not waste money. They have a reputation in Italy as the most careful spenders, which the rest of the country puts less politely. They prefer to call themselves prudent. Either way, the city has built its entire history on commercial arithmetic, and if you look up at certain facades along Via Balbi you will notice something that took me three days to register: many of the windows are painted on. A 1700s tax was assessed by the number of windows on a building. The Genovese painted false ones over the bricked-up real ones. The same impulse that built the Rolli system also painted the windows shut.
The food works the same way, because it was originally invented by people who did not waste anything. Pesto is what you make when you have basil, garlic, and pine nuts, and you need to put them on something cheap. Focaccia is what you bake when you have flour, oil, and salt, and you need to feed people in the morning. Farinata is a chickpea-flour pancake you eat standing up at the counter of a small shop, for almost no money, that has been the worker’s lunch in this city for centuries. The seafood is what you cook when the port is fifty meters from your kitchen door, the fish was alive an hour ago, and there is too much of it. The salumi are made out of the parts no one else wanted. The bread takes the oil that the bread alone could not justify. We ate all of it, every day for a week, in the small places in the carruggi that the Genovese eat in too, where the focaccia gets dunked into the bitter espresso at the bar in the morning in a movement that startles you the first time you see it, and where the bowl of pesto pasta arrives without anyone asking what you would like to drink, because in this city there is only one answer to that.
And then we ate the rest of it. The carruggi are the only place in Italy I know of where you can also eat good Turkish, Lebanese, Indian, North African, Chinese, and Japanese food, made by people who were not born in Italy and who came here because Genova has always been what Genova still is, which is a port. The kebab in a small place in the carruggi is the best kebab I have eaten outside Turkey. The ramen we ate one evening in the old city is the best ramen I have eaten outside Tokyo. The cocktail bars in the carruggi are better than the cocktail bars in London, which is heresy to say, but I have tried both. Genova has small jazz speakeasies whose doors carry no signs, full of Genovese sitting and talking dialect to each other, with kitchens turning out a handful of small plates each night. We came back to Genova twice during that first year mainly to eat in places like these, which is not what you expect to say about an Italian city, and which is precisely the thing.
There is a third Genova above all this, which is the wealthy residential city that runs east from the old center along the Corso Italia and up the hills toward Albaro. The streets there are wide. The buildings are five- and six-story, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, plain enough on the facade but evidently expensive on the inside. The neighborhoods are clean, organized, within walking distance of anything that matters, and they are where I would live if I lived in Genova, although I will not, for the same reasons I would not live in Livorno, which we have already written about. Beyond this third city is a fourth, which is Nervi, ten kilometers east of the center, a former fishing village swallowed by the municipality, looking on the surface like every other beautiful Ligurian seaside town we have driven through: painted houses, dramatic hills above the water, a small port, a seaside promenade that is one of the most loved walks in Liguria. Nervi is administratively part of Genova. The Genovese go there for a slow Sunday and call it leaving town, which it isn’t.
So this is what I have come to believe after a week of walking the city and four returns since. The Mediterranean has, at most, ten port cities of any real significance, and they belong to one another more than they belong to the countries they happen to sit in. Marseille and Naples and Genova and Trieste and Valencia and Algiers and Beirut have more in common with each other, structurally and socially, than any of them has with the inland capital of its own nation. The class split is the same. The dense old quarter is the same. The wealth on the hills is the same. The working port at the bottom is the same. The food invented by poor people that is now famous is the same. The number of people who arrived from elsewhere for work and never left is the same.
What makes Genova singular in this category is that it is the most undisguised of the Italian examples. Naples got grandfathered into the national myth. The country needed Sophia Loren and the bay and pizza, and so the rough parts of Naples became part of the brand, the love letter the country told itself about its own south. Trieste sits on the Slovenian border with an Austrian past, mostly read as a literary city rather than a port. Livorno is the small port that Tuscany prefers to think of as something else. Genova was never folded into the brochure. The Italians who tell you not to come are pointing at the place that does not fit the national-myth project, and they are right that it does not fit, and they are wrong that this is a reason not to come. It is the reason to come.
Genova is the only city in Italy where you can step out of Italy without leaving Italy. The carruggi do not look like Italy. They look like a Mediterranean port city in 1380. The food is Italian, but you can also get a kebab. The wealth lives on the hills. The poor live in the carruggi, where they have lived since the city was founded, except now they are also Turkish, Chinese, and Indian, and have brought their kitchens with them. You sit in a cocktail bar in a four-meter-wide alley in the old city. You walk five minutes uphill, and you are inside a Rubens. You walk five minutes downhill, and you are inside a container port.
We will keep coming back. Mostly for the kebab, to be honest.
