GENUINE GENOA

I spent much of the mid-1980s hanging around one great Mediterranean seaport and much of the mid-1990s hanging around another, and I can’t help comparing the two.

Both were powers of medieval Europe; both have large, often mysterious medieval quarters. Both boast impressive architecture and art collections; both have their own language, or at least dialect--part of a cultural identity setting them apart from the modern nations to which they have become attached.

Those are the similarities. On the other hand, one has become an exciting, popular destination; the other has remained, for tourists at least, little more than an overgrown backwater.

The first of these cities is Barcelona, the second-largest city in Spain, which marshaled local pride and immense civic and national resources to become a celebrated metropolis. The second is Genoa, the largest seaport in Italy, which has done little to exploit its cultural resources and which rarely attracts outsiders.

Genoa doesn’t seem to have discovered itself. Maybe it doesn’t want to. The city’s residents are famously self-satisfied and rather insular (an irony, considering their great tradition as long-distance sailors and explorers). And they are notoriously frugal.

The tale is told about Genoa’s celebrated 16th century admiral, Andrea Doria: When he entertained important guests on his ship, he served dinner on golden plates and then made a great show of tossing them overboard after the meal as a sign of his wealth. Later, his servants would haul up the nets he had positioned around his vessel and retrieve the dishes. At more modest dinners today, the Genoese are famous for sitting long after the meal and talking--not solely for social impulses but also because no one wants to ask for the check.

“The Genoese always look at the price,” a professor at the University of Genoa once explained to me. “Quality is important to the Genoese in all things, but so is what it costs. The Genoese will eat lobster at home sometimes, but codfish in a restaurant. They don’t eat to show off. Their attitude is, ‘People already know that I’m important. I don’t need to prove it.’ ”

I passed through Genoa once for a few hours in the 1970s, but my first long visit was in October 1992, when I arrived--for the first of what was to be a dozen or more times--to begin research on a book. I had an introduction to a local photographer who’d promised to show me around, but other than that, I had no plans except to wander the city for a week to see what I could see.

At first, what I saw was a big, busy, traffic-snarled place with more than its share of clumsy modern buildings and tacky shops. Then one morning, taking refuge from a noisy avenue, I turned into what looked like a quiet alleyway and found myself in the midst of a warren of little streets, called carrugi, that is Genoa’s medieval heart.

Here, most of the buildings, whether grand or modest, extensively rebuilt or modernized, date from the 16th and 17th centuries--some even from the 12th century or earlier. Nondescript shops neighbor ancient, noble houses. Everything is of human scale; buildings are rarely more than six stories high, palaces excepted, and are so close that laundry lines often hang between them.

I wandered these carrugi for hours: up lively but unfrenetic promenades lined with fabric shops and pastry shops and bars, down mute passages smelling of cats and garlic, into tiny squares defined by perfectly proportioned, elegantly ornate little buildings whose facades were often banded in broad black-and-white marble stripes.

Because this was Italy, much of what I saw along the carrugi had to do with food. I passed vendors of Genoese “fast food” selling crumbly slices of farinata (a sort of pancake made from chickpea flour and olive oil) and savory tarts filled with Swiss chard or mushrooms or potatoes. I stopped at one place whose walls were a mosaic, floor to ceiling, of glass jars filled with pickled vegetables, olives, sun-dried tomatoes and dried mushrooms; I stood in wonderment outside a white-tiled shop whose windows were decorated with slabs of tripe hanging on meat hooks and whose interior was dominated by huge copper caldrons in which tripe broth simmered over wood fires.

The carrugi of Genoa’s “old town” spread outward from the city’s famous port into a roughly fan-shaped web bordered approximately by the Via Garibaldi in the north and the Via D’Annunzio in the south. The carrugi are best visited in the day. The streets nearest the port should, in particular, be avoided after dark unless you happen to be a roisterous seaman.

When I emerged from the carrugi maze, I walked up a street called the Via Roma, lined with sober little upscale shops, among them a branch of the famous 18th century Genoese confectionery called Romanengo, and came upon a large, bright, elegant square called the Piazza Corvetto. It looked a little like Paris, a little like Madrid. Palm trees, pine trees and false acacia ringed the square, and streets fed into it from eight sides--some tiny, some broad, some uphill, some down.

Astonishingly, there was almost no traffic; the piazza seemed to glow in sunny silence. I stationed myself at a sidewalk table at an attractive 19th century cafe called Mangini and ordered a pre-lunchtime Campari and soda. Then I realized why the Piazza Corvetto was so quiet: It had been closed off by police for a demonstration of striking workers, which was just about to surge into the square.

I retreated into the cafe, finished my drink, maneuvered through the chanting crowd and found my way back to the sanctuary of the carrugi. As I ducked into a trattoria for lunch, I thought to myself, “I’ve just made a pretty good start at discovering the real Genoa.”

Genoa, which has a population of around 680,000, is the capital of Liguria, Italy’s second-smallest region after the Alpine enclave of the Valle d’Aosta. It’s also the capital of the Italian Riviera, sitting at the top of a gentle arc of coastline that stretches from Tuscany to the French border, dividing this fabled littoral into the Riviera di Ponente to the west and the Riviera di Levante to the east.

Genoa’s nickname, given to it by Petrarch in the 14th century, is “La Superba.” The Genoese have traditionally translated the term as “The Proud,” but it can also mean grand or arrogant. All three adjectives have certainly been applicable at various times in its history.

Etruscans and Greeks traded from the natural harbor here, and proto-Ligurians established a settlement around the harbor in the 5th century BC. The town began to develop as a serious commercial and maritime center in the 10th century. By the 12th century, Genoa was an independent republic with a population of 100,000, and by the 13th, a major capital of banking and trade. Genoa was the first medieval European city-state to mint its own coins.

The Genoese were legendary explorers (Columbus, of course, was a son of the city, as were a number of other navigators who explored the Atlantic), and their merchants bought and sold goods all over the Mediterranean, establishing trade colonies as far away as the Crimea, northern Germany and, even, according to one source, Brazil.

In 1848, inspired by the Genoese-born patriot Giuseppe Mazzini, the city became one of the hotbeds of the nationalist movement, the Risorgimento, out of which modern Italy was born; it was also the first major northern Italian city to rise against the Fascists toward the end of World War II. After the war, Genoa reestablished its position as a thriving port and came to be considered part of a “golden triangle” of economically important northern Italian cities, along with the financial capital of Milan and the industrial capital of Turin.

In the 1980s, however, the port lost business to Leghorn (Livorno) and Marseilles, and was criticized for its deteriorating facilities, rising costs and crime. The leftist terrorist group the Red Brigade was active in the city; morale plummeted. In part due to falling port revenues, Genoa suffered a severe recession. Only recently did business revive, and only now is the port beginning to hum again.

If the Piazza Corvetto has a certain quasi-Parisian elegance, the Piazza de Ferrari is broad and businesslike. Banks and insurance company headquarters dominate it, but it is flanked on one side by the 19th century Carlo Felice opera house, restored after World War II (rather anonymous outside, stunningly beautiful within), and on the other by the recently refurbished 16th century Palazzo Ducale (Ducal Palace).

I first visited the palazzo to meet that Genoese photographer, Giorgio Bergami. The light-flooded ground floor now houses an exhibition space, a couple of restaurants and a few shops--one of which Giorgio was renting to sell his photographs and posters of the city. A diminutive, friendly but quiet sort, Giorgio started my tour right in the palazzo, leading me to a broad doorway across the way from his shop to show me a post-World War II staircase/ramp (each “step” is about four feet long) designed by the architect Giovanni Spalla.

It’s an elliptical structure of dark green ironwork accented with dark yellow balustrades. Noting its sinuous shape and its steps paved with long, thin terra-cotta bricks, I remarked, “It’s almost like a sculpture of the carrugi.”

“Exactly,” Giorgio replied. “That’s the idea.”

It was also Giorgio who found me lodging--a simple hotel in an exquisite location--a few blocks downhill from the Piazza de Ferrari, on the smaller Piazza delle Fontane Marose--”of the surging fountains,” so named because water from the Peralto hill above used to course down into a 16th century cistern with such force that it literally made waves.

The Piazza delle Fontane Marose is dominated by an exquisite example of the city’s palaces--the late-Gothic Palazzo Jacopo Spinola, which is marble-banded from top to bottom. This building is the gateway to Genoa’s most famous thoroughfare, the Via Garibaldi, built between 1550 and 1570 under the supervision of the Perugian architect Bernardino Cantone. The Genoese like to call this the most beautiful street in the world for its calm elegance of proportion.

Today, two of the palaces on the Via Garibaldi--the Palazzo Rosso and Palazzo Bianco--are art galleries. The former houses a collection of Genoese and Venetian paintings (by the likes of Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto) and the latter contains mostly Dutch and Flemish works (by Van Dyck, among others).

On the top floor of the Palazzo Rosso are four extraordinary 17th century frescoed rooms, one for each of the seasons. The fresco devoted to spring is particularly voluptuous and energetic, with some three-dimensional portions extending over a wreath-like lower border, including a leg slung wittily over one door. The autumn fresco is far calmer, but generously festooned with grapes and eerily beautiful.

Here, I realized as I wandered through these gorgeous rooms, was another side of Genoa--an interior opulence and an artistic exuberance. This was what the Genoese did with some of the profits from their far-flung trade. This was how Genoese majesty came home.

One mid-December morning, more than a year after my first real visit to Genoa, I sat on the Molo Vecchio, or Old Jetty, in 70-degree temperatures, beneath a blue sky tufted with cottony clouds. The only sounds were of distant traffic, the occasional seabird, the intermittent low groaning of a winch.

Seen from here, Genoa is a marvel, a gigantic amphitheater glowing in the Mediterranean light. The birthplace of Genoa, and its undisputed nerve center, the port berths more than 200 ships at a time and, directly or indirectly, employs more than 20% of the city’s inhabitants. It’s a fascinating place, a jumble of styles, periods and sensibilities.

In one direction was the monumental fortified gate known popularly as the Porta Siberia. Some Genoese will tell you that it’s called that because it looks cold and forbidding; the truth is that the name is a corruption of “Ciberia,” from the Latin word cibo, food--because all comestibles imported to the city were supposed to pass through this portal. In another direction, like a gigantic ammunition clip created by artist Claes Oldenburg, a bundle of massive tanks, marked Esso Super Oil, towered over the water. Nearby stood the city’s aquarium, one of the world’s largest, housed in a long, ship-gray building that looked as if it might steam off into the sea at any moment. Behind it, across the road from the port, was the freshly painted, delicately hued frescoed facade of the Palazzo San Giorgio, former headquarters of the Genoese bank that all but ruled medieval trade and originally built in the 13th century.

Beyond the waterfront, the hills formed a ring of dusty green, out of which rose buildings old and new, mostly in pink, ochre and smoke-darkened white or cream. Here and there rose the crown of a medieval tower or the slender dome of a church. I thought about how sensible and self-contained the city looked. How proud.

Then I walked a few hundred yards to an anonymous little waterfront trattoria to meet my photographer friend Giorgio for lunch. We ate pasta with pesto (Genoa’s emblematic dish) and dried cod stewed with olives and potatoes.

We sat for a long time talking, until I picked up the check.

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GUIDEBOOK: Getting Around Genoa

Telephone numbers and prices: The country code for Italy is 39. The city code for Genoa is 10 (010 within Italy). All prices are approximate and computed at the rate of 1,500 lira to the dollar. Hotel rates are for a double room for one night. Restaurant prices are for dinner for two, food only.

Getting there: Alitalia, British Airways and Swissair offer daily connecting flights to Genoa from Los Angeles. Alitalia has daily nonstop flights to Milan from Los Angeles. Milan is 73 miles from Genoa.

Where to stay: Jolly Hotel Plaza, Via Martin Piaggio 11; telephone 839-3641, fax 839-1850. A sleek, business-oriented hotel perched just above the Piazza Corvetto. Rates: $190-$200. Hotel Bristol, Via 20 Settembre 35; tel. 592-541, fax 561-756. The city’s old, not-quite-grand hotel, on a busy, arcaded shopping street. Rates: $165-$235. Hotel Metropoli, Piazza delle Fontane Marose; tel. 284-141, fax 281-816; part of the Best Western chain, (800) 528-1234. Motel-like rooms but a superb location near the Piazza de Ferrari and the carrugi of the old city. Rates: $100-$140.

Where to eat: Carletto, Tempo Buono 5; tel. 290-476. A small trattoria in Genoa’s old quarter, with lots of seafood and pasta. Very good bianchetti in season: clams in tomato broth and fried fish; $50-$60. GranGotto, Viale Brigata Bisagno 69, Genoa; tel. 564-344. An upscale, Michelin-starred establishment serving much that is not Genoese, but also some dishes that are based strongly on local flavors, including tiny sea bass gnocchi with pesto corto (a blend of pesto and tomato sauce) and marinated warm rabbit; excellent wine list; $100-$130. Sola Enoteca Cucina e Vino, Via Barabino 120; tel. 594-513. The cooking is simple and mostly Genoese, including stuffed lettuce in tomato sauce, veal with mushrooms, the pureed vegetable tart known as polpettone; $60-$75. Ristorante Rina, Mura della Grazie 3; tel. 207-990. First-rate seafood and a good list of Genoese specialties, including minestrone, stuffed vegetables, pasta with pesto and stewed dried cod; $60-$80.

For more information: Italian Government Tourist Board, 12400 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 550, Los Angeles 90025; tel. (310) 820-0098, fax (310) 820-6357.