- This is easily one of the most ignored and underappreciated of all major Italian cities.
- And no surprise: a curated, dolled up, digestible version of Genoa is not easy to come by – no one has really bothered to produce a dumbed down list of local sightseeing attractions packaged up for an ‘average’ stay by a ‘typical’ tourist – but this is exactly what ensures its authenticity. And makes a compelling case for experiencing the former maritime republic firsthand. So long as the historiographical and travel literature continues to over index on Florence and Venice – and mainstream travel community keeps waiting for a sanitized version of the Genoa story to be delivered in a box with a bow on a silver platter – the opportunity to explore Genoa in a tourist-free setting is too great to squander. This culturally rich and highly panoramic city simply offers too much to be left off the travel map, it belongs to the same elite club as Florence and Venice and deserves better.
- This difficult but remarkable place is not a city museum living in its past: it is lived-in, gritty, crammed into a claustrophobically tight space winding up the mountain and, despite its dramatic setting, seems devoid of the comfort and convenience of the tourism infrastructure of mainstream Italian cities. You will need to do a lot of work on your own to properly discover it. A lot.
- Don’t count on crowdsourcing or on collective wisdom of crowds for help in uncovering Genoa’s firsts
- What do tourists (and promoters) know, anyway? How can one rely on their taste if Verona somehow enjoys the status of a top 4 tourist destination among the Italian cities? While Genoa, with its arguably contains the country’s most diverse repository of pre-war architecture – today its is also home to one of the world’s greatest architectural minds, Reno Piano, and his workshops – is stuck in oblivion? The city that was a fixture on Europe’s Grand Tour and inspired world’s greatest creative minds, remains in almost complete obscurity except for the most determined enthusiasts.
- Does anyone care that Genoa revolutionized finance, shipbuilding, and textiles industries in medieval times? That the city Republic was the first to introduce gold coinage in the 1250s, bills of exchange, third party insurance, and public finance? The city’s Banco San Giorgio, born out of defeat by Venice in the late 1300’s and hence one of the world’s oldest public banks, remained active for over four centuries – this fact is little known even among historians of finance despite tens of thousands of daily records and documents that are slowly being discovered – this little known predecessor of the Bank of England institutionalized banking as we know it. Genoa pioneered the issuance of government debt, introduced double entry bookkeeping, financial control, the clearinghouse, and the sinking fund, and helped drive acceptance of creditor contracts, lowering the risk of default and the cost of capital. Genoa had a more advanced sovereign banking infrastructure than Venice or Florence, serving during its golden age as Europe’s source of funds and a gateway to America. Genoa’s commercial development predated that of Florence, the City Republic used its innovations in early modern banking to secure the role of financiers of explorations and campaigns led by Spain and the entire Habsburg system – roughly the footprint of the entire Europe ex France and Poland and minus certain Italian states – for centuries to come, helping control and defend the flow of funds between Italy and N Europe in the 16th and early 17th centuries. But don’t expect this fact to change many vacation itineraries.
- Mostly associated with salami, focaccia, and pesto (salami misplaced, pesto well deserved), Genoa gets no credit for one of the iconic symbols of consumerism and perhaps the most popular of consumer staples (‘jeans’ is nothing but a corrupted version of ‘Genes’, the French for Genoa – French because ‘denim’ is another corruption, of ‘de Nimes’, the name of the place in the Southern France where the fabric, destined for the jeans of Genoa, was made).
- Genoa boasts the world’s oldest surviving municipal archives with ample records that are unique in continuity and scope. Thanks to its long and vibrant history, the Ligurian city a number of quality museums, including many private and at least a dozen public collections featuring Ancient, Classical, Modern, Western, Ligurian, and Oriental art; four impressive maritime museums, and a number of collections of curiosities worth visiting.
- Its old town is Europe’s largest (or second largest after Venice) and by far the continent’s densest, and is still in full occupancy and everyday use today. Genoa produced Europe’s first wholesale urban redevelopment project that followed a unitary framework: Strada Nuova. The street was completed in mid-1500s and centuries before the great European capitals were able to implement similar renovation at scale. London’s Regent St had to wait until the Great Fire of the next century provided the excuse, and Haussmann’s boulevards or Vienna’s Ringstrasse much longer than that. And even the purposeful expansion of Torino’s regal center by Carlo and Amedeo Castellamonte was still a century away when Genoa’s novelty was already diverting the Grand Tour traffic.
- Genoa gave the world Johann Lucas von Hildebrandt, who as one of two main architects of the Holy Roman Empire – along with Fischer von Erlach – shaped the baroque building boom that swept Vienna in the decades after Poland’s Jan Sobieski rescued the city from the Turkish siege in 1683. Brought to the Hapsburg capital as a military engineer by Eugene of Savoy and elevated to court engineer, von Hildebrandt built many of Vienna’s most significant palatial estates that still define its iconic cityscape today. It is also difficult to overstate his influence on urban planning and architectonic character of central Europe in the centuries that followed.
- More famously, the maritime city republic gets credit for Renzo Piano, Paganini, and Columbus. Genoa produced top Italian names that have resonated through the European history. Andrea Doria – of a dominant Genoa clan for centuries and after nearly a thousand years still one of Italy’s wealthiest noble families known for one of the world’s finest private art collections housed in the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj in Rome – was a powerful admiral of the 15th-16th centuries. The Genoese aristocrat took turns serving as commander Spain’s Holy Roman Emperors Charles V and Phillip II when the Empire was at its peak; their long-standing nemesis, King of France, Francis I, and the Medici Pope Clement VII, each time fighting for the interests of his native maritime republic. Dorias’ great rival, the House of Spinola, served the city and the Empire for six centuries, supplying a stream of Genoa’s captains of the people, consuls, archbishops cardinals, and military commanders. They managed to beat Venice and Pisa in the 13th centuries, free Genoa from the rule by Naples and Milan in the 15th and went on to serve, in their families’ Ghibelline traditions, the Spanish King and Holy Roman Emperor, most notably in Flanders in the 16th and 17th. No Genoa narrative would be complete without Rubens, Van Dyck, the city’s great Flemish connection, and flourishing textile trade with Flanders.
- Much like with Turin’s reputation as the Detroit of Italy, Genoa suffers from its image as the country’s busiest port. And the peninsula’s perhaps most chaotic city. It has struggled with post-industrial transition, to date far less successful or deliberate than Turin’s. The Savoy capital to the North successfully projects a shadow larger than its true self, maximizing and amplifying its offering in a well curated and appealing outward display. Genoa, a significantly larger but messier repository of historical content, holds it all within its walls, below the radar of mainstream traveler and history reader. If Turin’s vibe is that of a statuesque and slightly puritanical beauty, Genoa doesn’t seem to mind being perceived as one that is dirty and slightly untidy, so explore this hidden jewel at your own risk.
- No question, the sopraelevata highway is an eye sore, running in front of the facades along the waterfront and cutting off the city from its port, it is considerably uglier than most of the consistently monstrous urban ‘improvements’ that contaminated Western cities in the ‘50s and ‘60s. The city doesn’t seem to love all is neighborhoods the same, vague signs of poverty and neglect are everywhere, some pedestrian streets in the old town are bland and not nearly as pleasant as they could be, and many narrow lanes have little or no room for pedestrians. Its population and infrastructure – like elsewhere in Italy and Europe – are ageing, and recent underinvestment is catching up. But the same problems never stopped tourism in Venice or – admittedly a stretch – in New York, and shouldn’t be applied selectively against the Ligurian capital.
- The city looks better from above and, thanks to its characteristic detail. Its layout and topology make the rundown areas between hillside streets and the palazzi easily avoidable. Its skyline and aerial map of densely packed spaces help the city retain a distinctly Spanish, if not South American, character. If Turin is the most French of Italy’s major cities, and Milan and Trieste – along with everything in between – make clear their past association with the House of Austria, then Genoa is their relative from the Spanish side of the Habsburg family.
- But Genoa has multiple personalities, and there seems to be no appreciation of the fact that Renzo Piano, one of the most transformative and productive architects of the 20th century (how about the Pompidou Center in Paris?), did a great job cleaning up the old horseshoe port with his Columbus Exhibition project – and doubled down with his design of Genoa’s subway stations. His reclaimed leisure zone offers great views all around and is decidedly a success of urban redevelopment, judging by the heavy use of the marina and its museums, restaurants, and open spaces, by several generations of locals. Plus Eataly Genova is located right there.
- The city had much more luck asserting itself in pre-industrial Europe than fighting for mindshare of today’s mainstream tourist. Diverse forms of city governance and flexible loyalties allowed Genoa to leverage the Greeks and the Byzantine Empire in the 14th century, then France and Milan. Ever since Genoa established its republic in the 11th century (it would last for eight centuries), it remained quite busy in its onward and upward march. Busy setting impressive goals. Then exceeding them.
- Busy, working on reaching its golden age in the 12th century, before tripling its population in the 13th to tie with Venice and Milan for Europe’s 4th most populous metropolis, 3 times the size of London at the time (Granada and Paris, Europe’s top two, were only 50% larger). In the face of the Guelf Ghibelline rivalries, a civil war, the defeat by Venice at Chioggia, plagues, and a period of foreign rule, it was the city’s inexhaustible creativity that helped it reach and enjoy another peak in the 15th century – despite the fall of Constantinople and its Eastern trading colonies – only to be surpassed again in a more aristocratic form by another peak in the 16th and 17th, before fading into ‘forgotten centuries’ in late 18th. Each peak leaving a more impressive mark on the city and its private and public spaces than the prior one.
- It managed to defeat Pisa, Venice, its older rival City Republic, along with some lesser coastal powers in a struggle over control of the broader Mediterranean and over access to Constantinople. In Naples and Sicily, the Genoese leveraged their loyal presence into a fulcrum of local control for the benefit of Spanish viceroys at the expense of local elites, further advancing their direct commercial prospects and securing the City Republic’s privileged future vis-a-vis the Holy Roman Empire.
- Medieval and Renaissance Genoa was capitalist and individualistic to the core, fractionalist in governance, and even in the way it privatized the provisioning of its naval strength for the Republic and for the Spanish crown. Due to its geographic isolation between mountains and the sea, its small land base, and its limited local market, the city developed a complex relationship with the outside world from the start. Genoa secured diverse overseas markets putting to use both its hardware (its urban density, its fast, well defended and impressively armed merchant galleys, its trading routes and overseas outposts) and its software (sovereign relationships, social participation and mobility, including a rare instance of engagement of women in property rights, capital management and maritime trade finance as early as the 12th century), in the process creating a truly global and sophisticated early economic system of private partnerships.
- From the 12th century on, Genoa planted its merchants across the commercial world of the day, establishing a modern network of ports beyond the Mediterranean, from London to Bombay and from Antwerp to Crimea, along the Black Sea, the North Sea, and the Atlantic. In the 13th, it became the largest Mediterranean trader N of the Alps. As shipment by land remained safer and in many markets often cheaper than by sea, Genoa secured overland trading routes and merchant emporia across Poland (Alexandria-Genoa-Milan-Nuremberg-Krakow-Lwow) and established its very own merchant colonies and fortified trading routes, complete with still imposing fortresses much further East (in Caffa, Sudak, Khotyn, Constantinople, and Romania), cementing a dominant role in Oriental trade still visible in well preserved structures across these lands. Genoa’s trade with N Africa and Levant – notably Egypt and Syria – predated even the Portuguese presence there. Its Atlantic outposts and its diaspora of tradesmen on the Iberian Peninsula helped the city draw Spain and Portugal into the world of long distance seaborne trade where the Genoese maintained lasting and unquestioned influence, blazing the trail for future voyages, discoveries, and overseas ventures.
- The Genoese trading routes and defensive outposts provided entrepreneurial and physical infrastructure for traffic, trade, and urban development. Venice’s overseas settlements were mostly about state-run military expansion, integration and power; Genoa’s was a celebration of private enterprise. In centuries long rivalry between two leading Italian Maritime Republics – Genoa and Venice – the balance of power shifted back and forth with victories and crushing defeats in battle, but a look at the port and maritime industry of today’s Genoa in comparison with Venice’s sinking status as a living city leaves no doubt which of the two cities had more staying power to prevail longer term – in everything but coverage by mainstream tourist guides.
- Commercial activity was the main occupation of patricians in Renaissance Genoa. Early ducal and royal capitals succeeded in consolidating mercantilist state power and great art collections; in contrast, Maritime City Republics and free cities N of the Alps with their undiluted meritocracy and more or less fair merchant competition, successfully founded modern capitalism. Capitalism of industrial but also of financial variety. In this context, medieval Genoa – the public appointed the Doge – was more democratic and at the same time more individualistic than Venice, its population had much greater participation in trade, politics and governance, and had a higher degree of development of individual enterprise and a higher capacity to adapt financially and culturally – a unique blend of public and private achievement. In a world that has become – with the nation state, the ethnic self-determination, the total warfare, and the universal suffrage – increasingly regulated, administratively managed, and at times outright totalitarian, could early Renaissance Genoa’s be the closest Western civilization ever got to freedom?
- If its banking innovations are old news, medieval Genoa also cracked the code in raising equity capital for its ambitious and risky ventures, as early as the 12th century, well before other cities. It did this via partnerships – temporary, special purpose commercial partnerships where passive, stay-at-home, limited investors funded the adventures of the active general partner. These partnership agreements spelled out predefined terms for capital contribution and profit sharing upon return, and carried different levels of risk and reward. The City Republic itself sold its future tax receivables transferring its fiscal power to private individuals. Its commercial ingenuity didn’t stop there; Genoa excelled at leveraging its naval power to secure trading privileges, at times offering to other powers an indemnity against military attack in exchange for exclusive export rights and tax exemptions.
- Torino’s progressive but regimented development took place in the shadow of resident royal court, – enlightened but hierarchical, top-down, planned and centralized, and subordinated to its great ambitions. In contrast to this command and control development, Genoa came together as a City Republic, spontaneously if not chaotically, from the bottom up. City governance in Genoa was simply at the opposite end of the spectrum – decentralized, multipolar, communal, and distributed (among patrician families), supported by guilds and the merchants – and ultimately not under direct sovereign rule and not under control of any larger political entity. Urban and urbanist to the core but pretty much the opposite of a royal capital, Genoa remained in a powerful position as a supplier of commanders, explorers, financiers, and advisers to the Spanish Holy Roman Emperors, the supranational mega sovereigns of the day.
