Genoa

Some say Genoa takes its name from Janus, the two-faced god of time and doorways. Perhaps. What’s certain is the city has two aspects: the vast industrial port, its docks the bared teeth of the Italian Riviera; and, in the ruched strip of land between the Ligurian Sea and the hills, a bewildering network of alleys, stairways, and irregular little squares. ‘Genoa is the tightest topographic tangle in the world,’ wrote Henry James, ‘which even a second visit helps you little to straighten out. In the wonderful crooked, twisting, climbing, soaring, burrowing Genoese alleys the traveller is really up to his neck in the old Italian sketchability.’

The port has sent out illustrious exports in its time. Most historians think Christopher Columbus, the son of a wool weaver, was born here and lived next to one of its medieval gates. The Genoese don’t doubt that he was, and maintain a rather desultory birthplace museum in his honour. Giuseppe Mazzini came from here too, as in some manner did jeans – a corruption of Gênes, the French name for the city.

But forget about the sea, and instead dive into those alleyways. Here is a city (James again) that ‘would be almost impossible to modernise’, in which the medieval high-rises have clung close to one another for centuries, forging a world of shadows below. The effect it has on the visitor, of disorientation alternating with discovery, can be beguiling. Genoa was once La Superba (the proud one), one of the great maritime republics alongside Venice and Pisa, with the architectural and artistic ambitions to match. There are grand buildings here, not least the dozen 16th-century palaces on the Via Garibaldi that Rubens engraved in 1622 (three now house the city’s civic art galleries).