GENOA

Once a grand maritime republic, this Italian city impresses with its medieval core, lavish palazzi and steep topography, forever gazing out across the Mediterranean

- Julia Buckley

It rivals Florence for Renaissance-era palaces, Venice for medieval alleyways and Naples for its prime Mediterranean position. It’s a city that lives its history instead of calcifying it into museums; where takeaways sell farinata crepes (the recipe for which hasn’t changed in centuries), shops are slathered in frescoes, and antique public lifts whisk you through the centuries, picking you up in La Belle Époque and dropping you in the Renaissance.

So why isn’t Genoa better known? After all, 200 years ago it was a prime stop on the Grand Tour. Everyone from Charles Dickens to Mark Twain passed through; Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley set up home nearby. But fierce post-war industrialisation and urban planning knocked Genoa’s status as a cultural hub on the head. Today, its port eclipses almost everything else.

But the past is still here. Cruise ships cast off from docks beside the Porto Antico, where a young Christopher Columbus first got a taste for seafaring. It’s now a pedestrianised waterfront, redeveloped with shops and restaurants by Renzo Piano, the architect famous for designing, among other landmarks, Paris’s Centre Pompidou and London’s Shard. Beyond the flyover, which severs sea from city, lies what’s believed to be Europe’s largest medieval city centre.

Here, narrow alleyways, called caruggi, rollercoaster over the steep hillsides, curling around one another like a tangled ball of string. Jewellery-box churches perch on stilt-like staircases in cramped piazzas; the palaces of the great and good squash together on street corners.