GENOVA, Italy - In "The
Innocents Abroad," Mark Twain describes the narrow streets of historic Genoa
as "crooked as a corkscrew." "You go along these gloomy cracks,
and look up and behold the sky like a mere ribbon of light, far above your
head," he writes. Twain may have been looking up, but the first time I set
foot in Genoa's old city, my eyes were riveted on the North African drug
dealers and the "we've seen it all, honey" prostitutes that were
leaning against dirty walls and grimy corners.
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| Genoa City Gate |
Genoa was my city of choice. I
had chosen it from the maps and travel books piled high on my dining room table
in Philadelphia as the place I wanted to live when I moved to Italy. It seem to
offer everything on my wish list: a city on the sea, close to Tuscany and the
South of France. But I had never been there. When I finally did get there, my
first thought was that I had just made the biggest mistake of my life.
On that first day, when I set out
to explore my new town, the streets of the historic center were deserted. In
the distance a church bell rang. It was 1 o'clock. The cramped alleys were
shrouded in shadows, the midday sun blocked by the tall stone buildings. With
their morning grocery shopping done, neighborhood housewives were already home
preparing lunch for their families. Retail shops and offices were closed, local
merchants and clerks off somewhere eating. The only people left on the streets
were the drug dealers, the prostitutes, and me.
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| My New Neighborhood? |
In spite of my first unsettling reaction,
I ended up staying there for six years. Genoa, I would eventually discover, is
a regal city filled with art and architectural treasures, as mysterious as a
Byzantine bazaar.
The city sits like an open shell,
facing the Mediterranean Sea. The vertical landscape runs from the harbor to
the mountains above, and you can count the number of almost straight, flat
streets on one hand. Genoa is old, at least 2,000 years old, and boasts the
largest continuously occupied historic center in all of Europe. Strolling along the streets of the old city with me were
crowds of sailors in strange foreign uniforms, the cacophony of languages
yielding bits of rolled R's and guttural H's. The sights and sounds and smells
that greeted us were the same ones that have greeted merchant galley crews and
sailors since the days of Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus.
In those long-ago days, sailors
coming into port after months at sea would hang over the rails for a glimpse of
the Lanterna, the 16th-century landmark lighthouse, and rejoice. Condemned
prisoners would shudder at the same site, for the lighthouse is next to the
Molo Vecchio, the old dock, where they would be given the Church’s blessings
and promptly hanged.
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| Our Troops Won the War but These Streets are too Rough for them? |
I was
warned to avoid the dark, narrow alleys near the Molo Vecchio, and I did,
mostly because they smelled bad. Then one day I came across a tattered old sign
tacked up on one of the alley entrances that said "Off Limits," and
discovered that the area was once also banned to American sailors. In the first
years after World War II, Genoa was an open city. There was rampant
prostitution, severe drug problems and an uncontrolled influx of illegal
immigrants. In fact, the only organized thing about Genoa was the crime.
Wandering around now, I felt
disoriented, then realized why. Some of the buildings I once used as landmarks
have been torn down in an attempt to gentrify the harbor area. The port is no
longer focused on commercial shipping but on the largest aquarium in Europe.
Genoa has also become a port of call on the cruise ship routes. But don't let
that put you off -- the city is still very much a real experience.
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| Streets of Old Historic Genoa |
Just a few steps up from the port
is Palazzo San Giorgio, former home of Banco San Giorgio, the powerful bank
that held sway over the finances of the Maritime Republic of Genova for more
than three hundred years. It was here that Marco Polo, sweating out his prison
time in the building's dark and dank dungeon, recorded the story of his travels
in Asia. He had been captured and imprisoned by the Genovese during a sea
battle against the Venetians in 1298.
A couple of centuries later, Christopher Columbus came
knocking at the door looking for money to finance his exploratory voyage to the
Far East. But we all know how that story ends.
For centuries, the Genovese made
their living on unpredictable and often dangerous seas. While they may have
pretended to be tough-as-nails sailors, their fragility and faith is
demonstrated by the delicate marble Madonnas set in the mini niches found on just
about every corner in the city. And before heading out to sea, many sailors
would stop at the Basilica of San Lorenzo, the town's main cathedral, and pray
for a safe return.
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| Cathedral of San Lorenzo, Genoa, Italy |
The city’s Cathedral, a massive
Lombard Romanesque-Gothic structure, is wedged into a tiny piazza and seems too
big for the space it's in. Its alternating black and white bands of marble are
typically Genovese and were allowed only on major churches and palazzi of the
rich and powerful. The bones of St. John the Baptist, Genoa's patron saint, are
said to be here, as was a very large bomb that was dropped on the church – but
didn’t explode -during World War II. Unnerving. The bomb has been removed, but the memory lingers on.
Genoa was, and still is, an
incredibly rich city. The city's merchant fleets once reigned supreme from
Spain to the southern Russian ports on the Black Sea, and huge fortunes were
amassed here. Families with names like Doria and Grimaldi built large,
impressive palazzi next to each other on Via Garibaldi, a few short blocks
north of the cathedral. The Genovese claim it is the most beautiful street in
the world. And it just might be.
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| Palazzo Reale, Genoa |
Many palazzi in town are now
museums, government offices or banks, although some, like the Palazzo
Pallavicini, are still very much lived-in private residences and their owners
make up the upper crust of Genovese society. When the Queen and Prince Philip
are in town, they usually sleep over at the Pallavicinis.
I had been in Genoa only a few
months when they started cleaning up for the big-bang Columbus
500th-anniversary celebration in 1992. It was the summer of 1990 and things
were starting to move -- after all, Columbus was a homeboy. The Americans were
in town working on the aquarium, and trucks were finally starting to haul away
the 50-year-old pile of rubble that was once the city's opera house, hit by a
bomb during the World War II.
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| Palazzo Cicala, Genoa |
One by one buildings were wrapped
in scaffolding and plastic, and the sound of old stone and glass rattling down
chutes into huge bins became commonplace. The Genovese, known for their frugal
habits, would just walk around the work sites and shake their heads at the
money being wasted on such nonsense as cleaning old buildings. Even after that
dirty ugly duckling of a Doge’s Palace was transformed into a gleaming pale
yellow jewel by a magic wand full of detergent, skepticism remained.
In spite of the fact that Genoa
was once named Europe’s City of Culture by the European Union it doesn't do
much to promote itself. At the tourist bureau, questions regarding the Filippo
Lippis, Van Dycks, Pisanellos, Caravaggios and Genoa's own Bernardo Strozzi on
display at the city's most important art museums, draw blank stares. And even
though hotels have sprung up around the port and the large warehouse once used
to store cotton is now a convention center, Genoa can't seem to decide if it
wants tourists, packaged or otherwise, to visit.
It is a very private place, where
things may not always be what they seem. Even the Christopher Columbus house
near the 12th-century Porta Soprana is a fake, but it doesn't matter. No one goes
to Genoa to see Columbus's house anyway. What is worth seeing here is an
unedited version of Italy, a raw and in-your-face quality that so many Italian
cities have lost in this day of global merchandising and fast-food outlets.
Yes, there are Benetton stores and McDonald's, but they seem to fade into the
background, paled by the Genovese doing what they do best: buying, selling and
trading.
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| Banco di San Giorgio |
As for me, I really was an
innocent abroad. When I set out, I had fixed my position from a map and
unknowingly headed right into a storm. Nothing I had learned in a lifetime of
living in America prepared me for life in Italy. Every day was a challenge.
Slowly, but ever so slowly, I developed the skills that made navigating in this
traditional society a little easier.
My Italian life took on a rhythm
all its own. I learned to drink coffee standing up, a quick stop at the bar for
a frothy cappuccino on my way to somewhere else. I learned to grocery-shop in
grams and liters, measure in meters. I learned not to take the indifference of
my neighbors personally. Their aloof behavior was in direct contrast to that of
other Genovese I met who took me under their wings, introduced me to their
doctors and dentists, electricians and plumbers, important contacts in a
society where you don't trust anyone you don't know. They taught me to live in
the moment. The future, they said, would arrive all too soon. And so it did.
The day I moved to Milan to write and
edit an English-language magazine was bittersweet indeed. I was still exploring
Genoa.
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| Palazzo Doria, Genoa |
For you see, Genoa, is not a city
you can rent for an hour, or even a day like the ladies who hang around the
port. It is not a city that opens itself willingly to those passing through in
a hurry, heading for other faraway places. It is a city that first seduces you,
puts you under its spell, and then only little by little allows you to see its
magic. While it is a city of gray stone and dark medieval alleys, it is also a
city of magnificent palaces and palm-treed boulevards that run along the Mediterranean
Sea. It is a city of contrasts and contradictions, the gateway to the mimosa
yellow, oleander red Riviera. A city to treasure.
