Why a Grand Tour of Italy Should Include a Stop in Genoa
Less crowded than Rome and Florence, Genoa has magnificent churches and palaces that are understated on the outside but extravagant on the inside
Genoa is attracting travelers again as the northwest Italian harbor city emerges from a postindustrial decline.
Twice a year during Rolli Days, dozens of Genoa’s historic palaces open their doors to the public, allowing visitors to view the interiors.
Genoa’s Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno serves as an open-air sculpture museum featuring thousands of marble scenes.
Genoa is once again a magnet for travelers.
A medieval rival to Venice and a financial capital of early modern Europe, this northwest Italian harbor city was a must-stop for 18th-century aristocrats on continental Europe’s Grand Tour. Now, as it emerges from a postindustrial decline, Genoa is again attracting tourists and with good reason: The city is full of surprises, with an eccentric charm that inspires exploration.
With its weird medieval alleyways, hilly setting and a transit system that might seem at home in an amusement park (think horizontal elevators and funiculars that tunnel through buildings), Genoa is Italy’s most exotic major city. But still awaiting a connection to the country’s main high-speed train corridor, it can feel like terra incognita, even to Italians.
Genoa’s magnificent churches—which typically have free admission, unlike churches in Florence and Venice—contain manifest treasures. And its culinary heritage, led by pasta al pesto alla Genovese and focaccia, may have gone viral in Italy and beyond, but taste far better here at home.
Even more splendors open up if you time your trip right. The palaces of Genoa’s 16th and 17th century golden age—which now have Unesco World Heritage status—can be hard to recognize from the outside. But twice a year during an event called Rolli Days, dozens of these discreet residences, along with stately villas and other historic buildings, open their doors to the public, allowing visitors to wander through the extravagant interiors. This fall, Rolli Days runs from Oct. 16 to Oct. 18.
You can soak up Genoa’s distinctive atmosphere at any time, however, by walking through its medieval historic center, marked by narrow streets called caruggi, which can be less than 3 feet wide. Too tight for a carriage, but spacious enough for the single-passenger sedan chairs carried by humans back in the day, they are now ideal for single-file strolling.
Italy’s sixth-largest city, with just under 600,000 inhabitants, Genoa is still a little gritty in stretches. But unlike Rome and Florence, many of its major attractions are nearly crowd-free, and smartphones will help you to find your way into and out of even the most cramped caruggi.
Here are some reasons to go to Genoa, and what to look out for when you do:
Terrain-defying transit system
The change in elevation from the waterfront at sea level to Genoa’s mountainous hinterland approaches 6,000 feet, and variations between adjoining neighborhoods can be as much as several hundred feet. Walking around may require navigating steep inclines or stairwell-like sidewalks, but over the past century the city has developed a unique transit system.
The Castello d’Albertis-Montegalletto line is called an elevator, or “ascensore,” but its small cabins are a combination of funicular, cable car and outdoor elevator that travel a vertical distance of around 250 feet. A roughly 10-minute trip—which, Willy Wonka-style, goes backward and forward, as well as up and down—will get you from the Piazza Principe train station to the fanciful D’Albertis Castle, the 19th-century home of a sea captain and now a museum. The view from the top takes in the whole of historic Genoa and its modern harbor complex.
Stellar art
Genoa’s peak in prestige, circa 1620, came when its patrician-merchant class, numbering a few dozen families, made the Genoese Republic the monetary masters of Spain’s overseas empire, turning the city into one of modern capitalism’s first financial hubs. These families became patrons to the most important artists of the day, such as Flemish painters Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck, as well as Genoa’s own Baroque master Bernardo Strozzi.
Jonathan Bober, a former longtime curator at Washington’s National Gallery of Art and expert on Genoa, says some of the highlights here include Van Dyck’s elegant portraits of Genoese nobles from the 1620s in the Palazzo Rosso, an imposing palace that is now a museum, and Rubens’s dynamic, early 17th-century altarpiece in the Church of the Gesù.
Meanwhile, the 12th-century Church of San Luca, rebuilt in the 17th century by the Spinola family, is deceptively simple on the outside, and a whirlwind of Baroque decoration on the inside.
Extravagant palazzi
The great palaces of Genoa’s golden age are tucked away in caruggi or line the Strada Nuova, a 16th-century thoroughfare marked by elegant Renaissance facades that serve to disguise the ostentatious Baroque and Rococo trappings inside.
Palazzo Spinola Clavarino, a 16th-century palace on Strada Nuova (also known as Via Garibaldi), will open up its main residential floor for Rolli Days this fall; it got an opulent makeover in the past few years.
The contrast between restrained facades and secretive decoration gets to the heart of the Genoese mentality, says Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano, who divides his time between his native Genoa and Paris.
A killer cemetery
While Genoa’s noble families splurged on their palaces during the Renaissance and the Baroque eras, the city’s rising middle class of shipbuilders, traders and professionals splurged on their tombstones in the 19th century in the Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno.
The hilltop cemetery may be a resting place for multitudes, but it’s also a seemingly endless open-air sculpture museum. Local artists, with easy access to Carrara marble quarried just down the coast, created thousands of sculpted scenes that by turns commemorate, re-create or just refer to the dead in towering dioramas.
In a realistic 1870s monument for a member of the Piaggio family, a dead man’s widow, shown leaving the door of a tomb, is wearing an elaborate lace shawl and mourning through her sculpted eyelashes. In an 1880s Symbolist monument for a member of the Carpaneto family, an angelic helmsman is shown steering away the departed in an impressive boat.
In a nod to Rolli Days, the city has recently launched Staglieno Days, which will take place on Sept. 26 and 27, featuring themed tours, concerts and pageant-like performances.
Humble, enriching food
Marked by frugal ingredients and a number of vegetarian main courses, Genoese food at its best seems simple but tastes complex.
Pesto is made here with basil, extra virgin olive oil, pine nuts, garlic and grated cheese, all ground to a thick paste. Locals eat it with trenette pasta, a linguine-like dried noodle, or trofie, an eggless fresh pasta, along with a few green beans and a bit of potato, and then thinned out with water until all turns a bright, evocative green.
Local food writer Enrica Monzani says that pesto, which might pass for upscale or gourmet dining elsewhere, was originally “a peasant trick to increase portions without spending too much money.” What makes it so extraordinary here is the local basil, which is harvested at its peak (to inhibit any bitterness,) and Ligurian olive oil, which tends to be buttery rather than biting.
Focaccia has become de facto sandwich bread or makeshift pizza crust elsewhere in Italy, but it tends to be bare bones in Genoa, where it has been made since the Middle Ages. Here, it’s a salty, oily, typically plain bread that must be eaten within a few hours of baking, and that locals relish in the morning, dipped in cappuccino. “The saltiness of the focaccia combines with the bittersweetness of cappuccino,” says Monzani, and “the experience is amazing.”
For more-unusual fare, Monzani recommends the local polpettone. Elsewhere in Italy that means meatloaf; in cost-conscious Genoa, it means a combination of boiled green beans and potatoes, ground down and combined with cheese, eggs and fresh herbs, and then baked. The result is something between an aromatic fritter and a funky soufflé.
Touches of extravagance
Genoa does occasionally like to show off. Pànera, the local alternative to gelato, is a rich, cream-spiked, coffee-flavored semifreddo.
The waterfront Galata Maritime Museum, meanwhile, has fascinating displays about favorite son Christopher Columbus, who was thought to have been born here in 1451, and a jaw-dropping reconstruction of a galley ship, once the building block of the Genoese Republic’s power and prestige.
There also is the spectacular Aquarium of Genoa, with 400 species of animals, where the standard admission price tops up at 38 euros (about $43)—or about the price of a month’s supply of breakfast focaccia.