Three days in Genoa: palaces so grand the city drew lots for who hosted the king
Two nights above the old port, in the densest medieval quarter in Europe, with a street of Renaissance palaces running along the ridge above it.
- Length
- 3 days, 2 nights
- Where you stay
- Genoa
- Places
- 7 across 3 days
Genoa is the great Italian city nobody visits. It ran a maritime empire for four hundred years, financed half of Europe, and produced Columbus and Paganini, and it now gets a fraction of the visitors of towns a tenth its size along the same coast.
The reason is that it does not flatter you on arrival. It is a working port wedged between the sea and a wall of mountains, so the city is stacked in layers up the slope, connected by lifts and funiculars, and the historic centre is a warren of alleys so narrow and so tall that daylight only reaches the ground at noon.
Get past that and it is one of the richest cities in Italy for a visitor. The alleys are the largest medieval quarter in Europe and full of tiny shops that have been selling the same thing for two hundred years. The ridge above them has a single street of palaces built to house visiting kings. And the food, which is oil, basil, chickpeas and fish, is the cheapest good eating in the country.
Highlights
- A street of Renaissance palaces where the city kept a register of which one would host which visiting head of state
- A striped cathedral with a British naval shell inside it that hit the building in 1941 and did not go off
- The old port rebuilt by a local architect who went on to design half the world's museums
- Focaccia at nine in the morning, dunked in coffee, which is what people here actually do
Where to stay
Genoa, two nights
A republic that lasted eight hundred years, ran colonies from Corsica to the Black Sea, and financed the Spanish empire from a handful of banking families in these streets. It was Venice's direct rival and beat it more than once, which is not the version of the story most people are told.
The money went into private houses rather than public monuments, which is why Genoa has no great square and forty extraordinary palaces. The alleys below them are the medieval city those families started in, and the two are five minutes apart.
Day by day
Day 1 in Genoa
Into the alleys, the cathedral, and the market
The first afternoon is for getting lost, which here is not a figure of speech: the caruggi are a genuine maze of alleys two metres wide with six-storey houses on both sides, and phone navigation is unreliable inside them. Head roughly downhill and you reach the sea; head uphill and you reach a main road. Between the two, look at the shop fronts, some of which have been selling dried cod or paper or sweets from the same doorway since the eighteenth century.
The cathedral is in the middle of it and is a shock of scale after the lanes. It is striped in black and white like a cake, and inside the right aisle there is a naval shell in a glass case: it came through the roof from a British warship in 1941, failed to explode, and the city kept it where it landed.
End at the covered market, which is where the city buys its vegetables, its basil and its fish, and where the stalls in the middle now also feed you.
- 15:30
Cathedral of San Lorenzo
ReligiousTwelfth century at the base, Gothic above, with two stone lions on the steps that every child in Genoa has sat on. The treasury in the crypt holds a green glass dish that crusaders came home convinced was the Holy Grail.
- 17:15
Mercato Orientale
OtherA big covered market in a former convent, produce and fish around the outside and a ring of small kitchens in the middle. Best before two, when the fish counters pack up.
- 19:00
Farinata and a glass of white
EatFind a place with a wood-fired copper pan and eat the chickpea pancake hot, standing at a shelf. Two euros, and it is the taste of the city.
With more time: The house Columbus is said to have grown up in stands beside a medieval gate on the edge of the old town, a small ivy-covered ruin that takes ten minutes and settles an argument.
Day 2 in Genoa
The palace street, and the view from the ridge
In the 1550s the richest families in Genoa built themselves a new street on the slope above the old town, and the city ran a public register of the best houses on it. When a king, a cardinal or an ambassador arrived, lots were drawn and one of these families had to accommodate him, at their own expense and to a standard set by his rank. The result is a few hundred metres of competitive display that has no equivalent anywhere.
Two of them are now the city's picture galleries and one is the town hall, so you can walk into what were private houses. Go up to the roof terrace of the red one for the alleys and the port laid out below.
Then take one of the public lifts up to the belvedere above, which is the view that explains the geography: the port on one side, the mountains on the other, and the city crammed into the strip between them.
- 09:45
Via Garibaldi
LandmarkWalk the whole street first without going in anywhere. The doorways are the show: painted vestibules, courtyards with fountains, and staircases that climb the hill inside the building.
- 11:00
Museums of Fine Arts - Strada Nuova
VisitTwo palaces, one white and one red, on a single ticket. Van Dyck lived in Genoa and painted these families, so the portraits are in the houses they were painted for. The red one has a mirrored hall and a roof terrace.
- 13:45
Lunch off Via Garibaldi
EatTrofie with pesto, which here comes with potato and green beans in the same bowl and is not a mistake. The streets just north of the palaces are full of cheap places doing it.
- 15:30
Spianata Castelletto
LandmarkA terrace above the old town reached by a public lift from a doorway on the street below, for the price of a bus ticket. Late afternoon is when the light is on the port.
With more time: The monumental cemetery in the valley behind the city is one of the great sights of Genoa and gets almost no visitors: acres of nineteenth century tombs where merchant families commissioned life-size marble statues of themselves and their servants. A bus ride out, an hour and a half there.
Day 3 in Genoa
The old port, and a last look at the sea
The waterfront was a fenced-off industrial dock until 1992, when the city hired a Genoese architect to reopen it for the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus sailing. He put in a piazza, a lifting crane you can ride, and an aquarium, and the result is the one part of the centre built for people rather than cargo.
The aquarium is one of the most visited attractions in the country, and unusually for such a thing it is genuinely good: big tanks, serious conservation work, and a section on the Ligurian sea that makes sense of what you are looking at from the promenade.
Principe station is a ten minute walk along the front, so an early afternoon train is easy.
- 09:15
Aquarium
LeisureTwo and a half hours if you take it seriously, and worth a timed ticket in summer. The floating section at the far end, in a barge moored alongside, has the sharks and the dolphins.
- 12:00
The Old Harbour
HistoricThe rebuilt dock in front of it, with a replica seventeenth century galleon tied up along one side and a rotating lift that takes you forty metres above the water for the harbour and the mountains behind it.
- 13:15
Focaccia for the train
EatBuy it by weight from a bakery in the lanes on the way back to the station, plain with salt and oil, and eat it warm before you get on.
With more time: If you have the extra half day, Boccadasse is a fishing hamlet of coloured houses swallowed by the city, twenty minutes east on the bus along the seafront promenade, and it is where Genoa goes for ice cream on a Sunday.
Before you go
Where to stay
The blocks around Via Garibaldi and Piazza Corvetto, on the ridge above the old town, are the comfortable choice: central, quiet at night and a short walk down into the alleys. Inside the alleys themselves is atmospheric and cheap, and some of it is genuinely seedy after dark, so read the reviews for the specific street rather than the district.
Both main stations, Principe and Brignole, are a walk or one bus stop from the centre and trains along the coast stop at both. If you are heading for the coastal villages, Brignole is usually the more useful of the two.
Getting around
The old town is on foot and there is no alternative, because most of it is too narrow for a car. Elsewhere the city is vertical, and the public transport reflects it: as well as buses and a short metro line, the network includes funiculars, a rack railway and several public lifts built into the hillside, all on the same ticket.
Use them rather than climbing. A lift from a doorway in the old town to a terrace two hundred metres above it costs the same as a bus ride and saves twenty minutes of stairs.
Tickets and timing
Almost nothing here needs booking, with the exception of the aquarium in high season, where a timed ticket saves a real queue. A single museum card covers the palace museums on Via Garibaldi and is cheaper than two separate tickets.
Several times a year the city opens the private Rolli palaces that are normally closed, over a weekend, for a small charge or nothing. If your dates coincide, drop everything else and go: these are frescoed staircases and hanging gardens inside buildings you would otherwise walk past.
Eating
Ligurian cooking is poor food that got famous. Pesto, made here with small sweet basil and served on twisted trofie pasta with potato and beans in it. Farinata, a chickpea pancake baked in a copper pan in a wood oven and sold by the slice. Focaccia, which in this city is a breakfast, eaten standing up and sometimes dipped in cappuccino.
The old alleys are full of friggitorie and bakeries doing all of it for a few euros, and they are better than most of the restaurants. For a sit-down meal, the traditional trattorie near the port do fish soup, stuffed vegetables and rabbit with olives, and several still take no bookings and shut when the food runs out.
Genoa takes two days to like and then people get evangelical about it. The turn usually comes in an alley, at the moment you realise that the plain door you are passing has a frescoed hall behind it, and that this happens on every street here.
Look up, take the lifts, and eat standing up.
Or make it a longer trip
These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.
Make it your trip
Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.
Common questions
- Is Genoa safe?
- Broadly yes, with one caveat everybody repeats: parts of the old town, particularly the lanes towards the western end near the port, are run down and used by street prostitution and drug dealing after dark. It is not violent, but it is unpleasant if you wander into it by accident. Stick to the busier lanes at night and it is a non-issue.
- Is Genoa a good base for the Cinque Terre?
- It works, but the villages are an hour and a half each way by train, which makes for a long day. If the coastal villages are the main event, sleep at La Spezia or in one of them and give Genoa its own two nights. Portofino and Camogli, both under an hour away, are much easier day trips from the city.
- How much time do the palaces take?
- A morning for the street and two museums. If you are serious about it, the wider set of registered palaces is scattered through the centre and several open on specific weekends each year, which is worth timing a trip around.
- Is it worth it if I only have a day?
- A day gives you the cathedral, the alleys and one palace, which is a good day. What you lose is the evening, which is when the old town is at its best and least intimidating, and the vertical city, which needs an afternoon of riding lifts to make sense.
- When should I come?
- Spring and autumn. The city is sheltered by the mountains and stays mild in winter, which makes it a decent cold-weather destination, and the alleys give shade in summer. August is the one month to avoid, when the coast fills up and half the good restaurants close.