Genoa Facts

District Guide-Genoa

Visitors either love or hate Genoa and few can remain indifferent. Most are wary at first and then begin to appreciate the city after having taken time to discover it. As Dickens wrote in 1843: I would never have thought that I would have become attached to the stones of the Genoan streets, and to think of the city with affection, as the place in which I had spent many hours of peace and happiness. Even today, Genoa provokes conflicting feelings, due to the fact that it is a place of contradictions. It is a Mediterranean port, which has always traded with nearby countries and so it has assimilated some of their habits and words, and it has always been a city of merchants and...

...(Genova) is as multilayered as the hills it clings to. It was and is, first and foremost, a port city: an important maritime center for the Roman Empire, boyhood home of Christopher Columbus (whose much-restored house still stands near a section of the medieval walls), and, fueled by seafaring commerce that stretched all the way to the Middle East, one of the largest and wealthiest cities of Renaissance Europe.

Genoa began as a port of the ancient Ligurian people at least by the 6th century B.C., when it traded with the Greeks and Phoenicians. Genoa threw in its lot with Rome against Carthage and was destroyed for its loyalty in 205 B.C., but Rome rebuilt it. By the early Middle Ages, Genoa...