Genoa, Italy

After spending September 11-23 in Plano for doctor appointments and to visit with family and friends, we traveled to Italy to continue our language studies and to begin looking at cities where we might want to live. (In case you missed our last post, we are moving to Italy next spring.)

Getting to Genoa

Including our time in the DFW area, we’re away from our RV for a total of 73 days, so we had to pack enough for all the seasons we would experience along the way, from summer in Texas–where the daytime high temperatures were still in the upper 90s Fahrenheit (around 36º C)–to the mild Mediterranean climate of early autumn on the Italian Riviera, to the chilly nights and cool days of late fall in the north of Italy, just south of the Alps. But we knew that we would be dragging our luggage through many hotels, train stations and airports over that time, so we managed to get our stuff down to one suitcase and a small backpack for each of us. The suitcases weigh the maximum allowable amount of 50 pounds, though!

Our first stop in Italy was in Genoa, in the region of Liguria. Earlier this summer, we had been considering the Ligurian coast as a possible place to call home, but since then, we decided that we were more interested in mountains than beaches. We left a few days in Genoa on the itinerary, though, just for sightseeing and to give us a chance to recover from the jet lag before we started language school.

The journey from Plano to Genoa took 22 hours door-to-door: a flight from DFW to London Heathrow, a layover at the airport, a second flight from London to Milano Linate Airport, a taxi ride from there to the Milano Centrale rail station, a nearly two-hour train ride to Genoa, and finally a 15-minute walk through the cobblestone streets (rolling our 50 pound bags) to our bed & breakfast-style hotel for the next four days.

Our B&B, Genova Suite Art, was located on the first floor (which, in Italy, is up one flight of stairs from the ground floor) of a beautifully restored twelfth-century building, Palazzo Fabiani, situated just a block from the waterfront.

By the time we finally went to sleep, we’d been awake for about 30 hours straight (we’re both unable to get much sleep sitting upright in an airplane). That part of international travel is no fun.

Historical walking tour

The next day, we slept late, and then in the afternoon took a private walking tour through the historic center of Genoa with a local guide whom we had found through the company Get Your Guide. Over the course of three hours, our guide Andrea gave us an excellent overview of the city’s history as he told stories and pointed out countless details that we would certainly have missed on our own.

The statue of Giovanni Croese, a 19th century Genovese friar better known as “Padre Santo,” features the saint ministering to a prisoner, an unmarried mother, and a sailor. As a major seaport at the time, Genoa had plenty of all three. The sailor is depicted wearing the typical rugged canvas pants that were produced in Genoa for sailors and dock workers out of a tough indigo-dyed cotton fabric called jeane, a corruption of the Italian word Genova. At about the same time, the French had perfected a similar fabric in the city of Nîmes; that fabric became known as serge de Nîmes, later abbreviated to just denîmes. Later that century, when French and Italian immigrants brought their trousers to San Francisco, dry goods merchant Levi Strauss turned the fabric, reinforced with his patented fabric rivets, into durable workwear that became known as denîmes jeane, or in English, “denim jeans”.

The oldest area of Genoa is full of medieval towers and other buildings, a few of which have been preserved in their original forms, but most of which have been repurposed, built upon, and refurbished multiple times over the years.

The old city of Genova is crisscrossed by narrow streets called carruggi, flanked on both sides by tall buildings. It’s easy to get lost, but as long as you can turn downhill, you’ll eventually arrive at the waterfront.

In the window of one of the storefronts, we saw an automatic pesto-making machine in action, slowly mashing basil leaves into a smooth paste with a mortar and pestle. It turns out that the most flavorful pesto (a condiment that originated in Genoa) is made by mashing the basil rather than blending it, but few people have the patience and time to make it the traditional way anymore. Technology to the rescue!

At the Teatro Carlo Felice, Genoa’s opera house, in the plaza between the original structure and a more modern expansion, is a statue honoring Genovese virtuoso violinist and composer Niccolò Paganini. The face of the statue accurately reflects his notoriously bad temper. Paganini’s Stradivarius violin is kept in a bank vault in Genoa, from which it is removed under guard and played only once a year by the winner of an international violin competition.

After we said goodbye to Andrea, jet lag was beginning to catch up with us, so we stopped for a gelato and briefly explored the wide promenade along downtown Genoa’s waterfront before heading to an early (by Italian standards) dinner.

Vertical Genoa and the Old Port

The next day, we woke up late again, as we were still trying to adjust to the difference in time zones. Fortunately, our B&B had a self-serve Continental breakfast available anytime. We then headed out to explore the city a bit more on our own. It seems that everywhere you look in Italy, you can poke your head into a doorway and find a beautiful church like this one, the Church of San Siro.

One of our goals for the afternoon was to explore “Vertical Genoa”. Because a series of hills border the port area, the metropolitan transportation system includes not only buses but also a series of elevators and funiculars that enable people to get up and down easily. A local transit ticket is good for unlimited rides for one hour and 50 minutes on all the different conveyances. We tried to locate the elevator up to a well-known viewpoint, Belvedere Castelletto, but missed it and ended up walking up the hill instead. At least we got our exercise! The panoramic view from the top was worth the climb, though.

Naturally, we had no trouble locating the elevator for the trip back down, though:

From there, we walked down to Genoa’s porto antico (old port) area, which was recently revitalized with the help of the famous Italian (and Genoa-born) architect Renzo Piano.

A bigo was a type of manual crane consisting of poles set up on a ship’s deck, tied together by ropes, that was used from pre-industrial times, until the advent of shipping containers, to lift up heavy loads from the quay and transfer them inside the hold. Renzo Piano’s Il Bigo, a modern reinterpretation of that device, supports both a panoramic sightseeing lift and the cover over the Piazza delle Feste, which is an ice skating rink during the winter and an entertainment space during the rest of the year.

Food tour

That evening, we met up with Marina, another local guide, for a walking tour focused on traditional Genoese foods. Our first stop was at Friggitoria San Giorgio, a stand near the port that sells a popular street food, coni misti, or fried seafood cones. We got a large paper cone filled with mixed fried seafood (acciughe–anchovies, calamari, and red shrimp) and fried vegetables (cuculli–little potato and vegetable fritters, zucchini, and panissa, which look like French fries but are made from chickpeas). I’m not an adventurous seafood eater, but I tried the fried anchovies, which were actually quite tasty, and the calamari, which was OK but not a texture I really liked.

Then we dove into the carruggi of the old city, where we made our second stop at Focaccia e Dintorni. From this little bakery, we got some of the most amazing focaccia we’ve ever tasted: thick, yeasty, fluffy but still nicely chewy, practically soaked in fragrant and fruity olive oil (which is baked in), topped with salt, and served warm. We each got two large pieces, and if we hadn’t known we had three more courses ahead of us, we both would have easily eaten it all–but instead, we each saved a piece to have with our breakfast the next morning.

Our third stop was a sit-down tasting at Il Tondin, whose dining room is located under a building inside a medieval water cistern. Here, we sampled a popular dish found throughout the Italian Riviera, trofie con pesto alla Genovese. Trofie are a small twisted pasta, which is served in a sauce of creamy basil pesto with chunks of potatoes and green beans.

We were getting pretty full by this time, but there was more to come! Our fourth stop, at Locanda Tortuga, introduced us to the Genoese specialty called focaccia al formaggio. Although it is called “focaccia”, it is completely different from the doughy focaccia genovese that we had enjoyed earlier on the tour–but it’s no less wonderful! Instead of a tender, open-crumb bread, focaccia al formaggio is a cracker-thin, crunchy, gooey, cheese-filled snack, made with an unleavened dough that gets stretched into two paper-thin sheets that are draped over a metal baking tray, with a layer of creamy stracchino cheese sandwiched in between them, before getting drizzled with olive oil and a sprinkle of salt. After a quick bake in a hot, wood-fired oven, the focaccia can be topped with a variety of additional toppings. Our focaccia al formaggio had six different versions: plain (still pretty darn good), truffle oil, prosciutto crudo, prosciutto cotto, cacio e pepe (a creamy cheese and pepper sauce), and of course, pesto. Wow!

Naturally, we had to end the food tour with gelato, right? Romeo Viganotti, a chocolatier that has been in business in Genoa since 1866, opened a gelateria in a 13th-century building around the corner from their patisserie in 2014. As you would expect, their dark chocolate gelato was awesome, but they also offer more unusual flavors like ricotta and pumpkin, gorgonzola and walnuts, blue goat cheese, citrus herbal tea with mandarin oranges, pesto (because, well, Genoa), and dark chocolate with rum. Sadly, we were much too full to try them all.

Other sights and Boccadasse

For Saturday, our last day in Genoa, we had planned to visit the neighboring suburb of Boccadasse, which our first tour guide Andrea had recommended to us, and we decided to try our skill at navigating the municipal bus system. On our way to the bus stop in Genoa, we ducked into the Genoa Cathedral–more formally known as the Cathedral of San Lorenzo–which we had seen at the end of our food tour the night before.

At a small market near the cathedral, this street performer was apparently levitating, held up only by his arm. Cheryl gave him a “donation”.

Our route to the bus stop also took us through Piazza de Ferrari, with its landmark fountain, and–wouldn’t you know it?–right by the Romeo Viganotti chocolate shop that had already closed when we’d passed the night before.

A 20-minute bus ride took us to the picturesque seaside village of Boccadasse, where colorful buildings seemed to tumble down the hill to the edge of the turquoise water, and sun worshippers lounged on the small, rocky beach.

After an obligatory gelato break in Boccadasse, we caught the bus back to central Genoa and prepared to leave the next morning for our three weeks of language study in Sestri Levante.