Looking back on the day – I arrived at midday – it was incredible and crazy what we packed into the afternoon and evening.
Nervi
I was met at the station on Wednesday by Charles and Pierre and whisked off on a long bus ride to Nervi, an outlying suburb of Genoa. It was a sublime sunny day – a relief after days of rain. We walked along a promenade to a restaurant with a magnificent sea view, basked in the sun eating another delicious fish based meal.
Via Garibaldi
Afterwards – a siesta? Mais non. Back to the centre of town and a ‘stroll’ (Charles, who is never tired, striding ahead, and Pierre and me limping behind) along Via Garibaldi.
This is a stunning road of sixteenth century palaces, each with a sumptuous entrance hall leading to a magnificent courtyard. A manifestation of the wealth of the Genoan aristrocacy. The road was designed just above the existing old town and one end finishes in the Piazza Fontane Marose, where I was staying. (A perfect location.)
It was too late (and I didn’t have energy left for tours of the palaces, several of which are open to the public, but we did peer into several and walked round one of the biggest, now the Town Hall!
Difficult to do justice to the palaces when tired, not wishing to hold the others back, and when not doing the tours. Also, the immense front facades are difficult to photograph, even though the street is wider than the older streets of the Historic Centre. I’ll just have to come back – no hardship.
Via Luccoli
From Via Garibaldi we descended down into the old, medieval city. Charles and Pierre live in a second floor flat on the Via Luccoli, which runs through this quarter and is buzzing with life. The buildings are all tall, dark, in massive stone, with their original medieval windows evidently replaced through the centuries. But you get the sense that people are living on all the floors above the – mainly quite smart – shops.
I’ve just discovered Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, thanks to the Internet and Project Gutenberg and plan to dip into it further, but here is his take on Genoa streets:
These people here live in the heaviest, highest, broadest, darkest, solidest houses one can imagine. Each one might “laugh a siege to scorn.” A hundred feet front and a hundred high is about the style, and you go up three flights of stairs before you begin to come upon signs of occupancy. Everything is stone, and stone of the heaviest—floors, stairways, mantels, benches—everything. The walls are four to five feet thick. The streets generally are four or five to eight feet wide and as crooked as a corkscrew. You go along one of these gloomy cracks, and look up and behold the sky like a mere ribbon of light, far above your head, where the tops of the tall houses on either side of the street bend almost together. You feel as if you were at the bottom of some tremendous abyss, with all the world far above you. You wind in and out and here and there, in the most mysterious way, and have no more idea of the points of the compass than if you were a blind man. You can never persuade yourself that these are actually streets, and the frowning, dingy, monstrous houses dwellings, till you see one of these beautiful, prettily dressed women emerge from them—see her emerge from a dark, dreary-looking den that looks dungeon all over, from the ground away halfway up to heaven. And then you wonder that such a charming moth could come from such a forbidding shell as that.
The entrance to Charles and Pierres place is a bit like that: a dingy door in a side yard, up two flights of stairs that have seen better days – and then you enter a flat which dates partly back to the middle ages. When they bought it I disapproved, because of the stairs and because it is not really big enough, but now I understand why they fell for it. The sitting room in particular has lots of character.
One thing Mark Twain does not seem to have mentioned is Genoa’s dogs. I have never seen so many dog owners promenading with their pooches, mainly but not all small and elegant. And not a turd in sight! In fact the streets were remarkably clean, though somewhat covered in white powder which Charles reckons is anti-rat stuff.
