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[philipcluff]

Genova: Italy’s overlooked, rebellious metropolis and maritime capital.

Genova isn’t a primary destination for most visitors to Italy. On the road from Nice, it might usually be a detour on the way to Milan or Rome. So why mention this small, apparently crumbling and cramped port in any debate of Italy’s great cities? Its frescos are flaking away under the Summer Sun, and those flakes are swept away onto the Mediterranean by the cold Winter sea breeze. Genova hasn’t witnessed much renewal of late, and in many ways that’s the point. Between the splendour of Florence, and the chic of Milan, Genova is Italy’s martyr. In point of population she is the fifth city of Italy, but by a considerable margin its largest port. Genova disputes only with Marseille the primacy of the Mediterranean.

Over eight centuries, the city did more to tether the fractured Italian peninsula to the enriching trade routes of the Mediterranean and modern creative vanguards of Western Europe than any other maritime republic, even Venice. Moreover, Genova’s trading spirit, per the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne, created the antecedents of modern entrepreneurship. The small thallasocracy, crammed between a rough sea and crumbling outcrops of rock, dared to lose sight of the horizon, building early fortunes in African Coral, Byzantine Silk, and Spanish Gold.

Known as La Superba, Genova first grew to prosperity as Venice did, by ferrying knights from all over Europe to the Crusades. The Lanterna, Genova’s iconic lighthouse, has guided ships into its harbor since 1128, and above it stand the Apennine mountains. These peaks formed a fortress, barring medieval invasions from Burgundy and Savoy, shepherding the city close to the Mediterranean. Descending in steep rows, they made for the city’s majestic appearance when viewed from the sea. Flanked by forests of Cedars, Pines, and Olive trees, the French Historian and Statesman, Jules Michelet, found the terrain to be perfectly in sync with the city’s character. “These aerial terraces who strive to climb higher and higher, to see above their neighbours, are observatories from where the capitalist admires his ships.”

At closer quarters the charm admittedly dries up. The centre is noisy and crowded, flanked by abjectly unkempt suburbs. Genova would surely have expanded if not for the constraints of its harsh landscape. Named after the two-faced Roman God Janus, the misleading facade of the city derives from a period of apparent decline. The grandest palazzos are late-Renaissance and Baroque and they give the impression of a much more fortuitous history than the one Genova really enjoyed in this period. By then, the Genovese navy had enjoyed their real golden age, scoring victories against Barbary Pirates, French Corsairs, and even seizing the huge iron chains of the gates of Pisa as spoils of war in 1284.

Genova maintained its independence as a city state until 1815 (only a generation before Italy came to exist), navigating a complex political landscape dominated by larger powers and building a unique social structure centered around its merchants. Even after its incorporation into the Kingdom of Savoy, Genova retained a strong sense of regional pride and ubiquity.

Pre-eminent among its merchant families were the Dorias, who by the 16th century had become a dynasty; and it was largely due to their efforts that Genova protected its great artistic traditions into the Renaissance. The Doria Palace built in 1529 for Andrea Doria was a homage to the wealth and good taste of the republic. The city’s palaces produce a more triumphal, if less romantic, effect than the more fanciful façades of nearby Turin and Milan.

The overseer of all this grandeur was the 15th century architect Galeazzo Alessi, a disciple of Michelangelo and favourite of Andrea Doria. Most of his palaces were sadly damaged by Allied bombardments in the bid to displace Mussolini, but the peculiar Genovese building style of striped marble and pointed conical towers, are preserved in the nearby villages and towns of Liguria.

Pressed round the eastern shore of the harbour is the ancient quarter of narrow streets and lopsided houses. The numerous medieval churches; including the family church of the Dorias, San Matteo, with its exquisite cloister and Andrea Doria's tomb is adjacent to the house of Christopher Columbus, Genova’s most famous inhabitant and the personification of it’s pioneering naval spirit. Ironically, Columbus sealed the city’s fate. His discovery of the New World effectively crippled Mediterranean commerce until the opening of the Suez Canal. As Columbus set sail in 1492, the Pope banned women from entering the beautiful ivory church of Saint John (San Giovanni) on the grounds that Saint John The Baptist had been murdered by a woman, Salomé. There is no clearer proof of Italy’s devotion to the decree of Roman Catholicism than San Giovanni’s restriction of female visitors remaining in place until 1950.

This isn’t the city’s only instance of religious zeal. Like the Turin shroud, Genova hosts the relic alleged to be the cloth Joseph of Arimethea used to wipe away Jesus’s blood from the crucifix, which supposedly crystallised into an Emerald. According to Petrarch, who resided and befriended Geoffrey Chaucer in Genova, twelve knights were appointed to protect it, each for a month every year with permission to kill anyone who tried to touch it. The city is no stranger to such religious violence, Pope Urban V made the clearest statement of the Papal Schism when he had five Cardinals executed in the city for allegedly supporting the breakaway ‘Anti-Papacy’ in 12th Century Avignon.

Subsequently Genova became, like Venice, a strategic accessory of the great Imperial European powers. Its gradual decline was sharply accentuated in the eighteenth century when the once-proud city was annexed by Revolutionary France; and its fortunes reached an all time low in 1800 when Napoleon’s most dependable General, Andre Masséna, dug in for a siege against the Austrians, which enabled Napoleon to win the Marengo campaign but starved most of Genova’s inhabitants to death.

Not all the French treated Genova so contemptuously, with Gustave Flaubert writing favourably that “Genova is a beautiful town, truly beautiful. One walks on marble here, everything seems to be made of marble. The most beautiful thing I saw in Italy was Genova.” He was joined in his admiration by no less than Richard Wagner, who wrote in the 1870’s “I have never seen anything resembling Genova. It is indescribably beautiful.”

After centuries of resistance, in I814 the Genovese Republic was extinguished and the whole of Liguria was incorporated in the growing Piedmontese dominions at the Congress of Vienna. This facilitated the rejoinder of Sardinia to the House of Savoy across the Ligurian sea, and became the backbone of the Risorgimento. Yet the Genovese, like the Catalans and the Irish, never fully accepted monarchic imposition. The royal palace is ornate but uninspired compared with those in Turin and Rome. Instead Giuseppe Mazzini, the great Republican leader, garners more local reverence than the royal House of Savoy.

The old neighbourhoods have gradually been surrounded by a more modern city, with some of Europe’s oldest skyscrapers built in the 1950’s and 60’s, the direct consequence of competition from shipbuilders and industrialists who were among the wealthiest in Italy. Unlike many cities, the modern Genova does not stifle the city’s classic heart. There is no surer symbol of this juxtaposition of past and present, bound by commerce, than the Palazzo San Giorgio. With its light Austrian-inspired frescoes and crumbling roof tiles, it serves as the port headquarters and has housed Marco Polo and Napoleon as a prisoner and conqueror respectively. Even Charles V was entertained here by the Dorias on his way to sack Milan and Rome.

In a sense, Venice will always get the better of Genova, and this is Genova’s salvation. The Italian peninsula receives more than 50 million visitors a year, most of whom crowd into Venice to the horror of the locals. I have passed through Genova enough times to safely say that it bears none of the same scars of tourism. However, there is nowhere else quite like it. Nowhere else in Italy has done more to foster the Northern genius, through the settlement of Flemish Old Masters Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony Van Dyck, as well as English authors Geoffrey Chaucer and Charles Dickens. Nowhere else has exported Italian cultural so effectively through the development of capital markets. Nowhere in Italy, in my opinion, has decayed with the same dignity, retaining the reverence of a proud and legitimately independent history.