There is nothing especially romantic about waiting at dawn at the pier at Pegli. The small town on the coast of Liguria was once very grand, a place where the well heeled and well connected came to enjoy summer sunshine, gentle walks and the quiet conviviality that is born of wealth and status. Poets and writers came to Pegli too, among them George Perkins Marsh, America’s nineteenth-century prophet of conservation. It was in Pegli that Marsh framed his apocalyptic vision of a planet made uninhabitable by the greedy excesses of humankind.
Pegli at dawn. And the first ferry of the day bumps alongside the concrete quay. The regulars climb aboard the Onda Azzurra for the half hour morning commute to Genoa. No luxury service on this no-frills run along the coast to the Porto Antico. Past the airport and the docks. Mountains of containers dominating the view. GP Marsh’s worst fears realised in the industrial sprawl. Memory and meadows trashed, dogs and their handlers patrolling this no man’s land. Edge city. A whiff of jet fuel as an Alitalia plane lifts off from Cristoforo Colombo airport. What would Columbus make of modern travel?
Genoa is at once Europe’s most engaging and most frustrating port city. And the regular local ferry in from Pegli is a good way to get a handle on Christopher Columbus’ alleged birthplace. Pegli has long since succumbed to its mighty neighbour. Like other nearby Ligurian fishing villages and resorts — picturesque Boccadasse, sedate Nervi and ostentatious Albaro — Pegli has been absorbed into Genoa’s urban sprawl.
Genoa is at once Europe’s most engaging and most frustrating port city. Cynics say that from afar is the best way to see the city.
The Onda Azzurra chugs on past Containerland, protected from the Mediterranean waves by a huge seawall. A naked man stands amid the cranes on a desolate quayside. Another whiff of jet fuel. Discount flights to instant pleasure. The Pegli boat slows. A huge cruise ferry called La Superba is edging into harbour, flagship vessel of a fleet that still links Genoa with a dozen ports around the Mediterranean.
There is no better way to arrive in Genoa than by boat. And the best boat of all is the Onda Azzurra, which ten times each weekday runs from Pegli into the very heart of Genoa’s old port. Modern ferries like La Superba may have every possible creature comfort, but they are much too large to moor in the heart of the city. Condemned to modern linkspans, the posh ferries get only a distant view of Genoa. Cynics say that from afar is the best way to see the city. But devotees of Mediterranean bustle enthuse over multilayered and multimarbled Genoa. The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas loved the city’s faded glamour when he visited. “The dockfront of Genoa is marvellous,” he wrote in a letter to his parents, extolling Genoa’s “colours and dirt and noise and loud wicked alleys with all the washing of the world hanging from high windows.”
Genoa in 2009 still has those wicked alleys. Geraniums now tumble down from window boxes amid the washing, and the stench of stale urine still haunts the darker lanes off the Via di Pre. But urban planners tried to separate ancient Genoa from its port. These surely were men who dreamt of container parks, loved the whiff of jet fuel and scoffed at those who suggested ferries might be the key to resolving Genoa’s waterfront traffic problems.
The name strada sopraelevata sounds innocuous enough. Heavenly even. As acceptable as Genoa’s wafer-thin mandilli drenched with pesto and topped with pine nuts. So the new road on stilts was pushed past the front of ancient palaces and rugged warehouses. Those arriving by sea had only an impeded view of the city, and those in the city looking out across the harbour saw Fiats and Lamborghinis.
The strada sopraelevata (elevated highway) separates Genoa’s port from the Old Town behind (photo © hidden europe).
Genoa’s most striking waterfront building is the Palazzo di San Giorgio. Nowadays that elevated multi-lane highway is a gash that cuts right in front of this ancient palazzo. Sometimes the traffic on the strada sopraelevata slows to a crawl and then drivers on the westbound lanes get a fine view of the facade of the palazzo: St George killing dragons just as city planners killed the Genoa waterfront.
On a good day, you can speed along the strada sopraelevata, catching a kaleidoscope of Genoa from the Porta Siberia to the Stazione Marittima. Along the way glimpses of crumbling facades wrecked by the pounding traffic, monumental towers and parapets, and flagpoles flying red and white flags. St George is everywhere in Genoa. England has no monopoly over its national flag. Indeed Genoa was using the red cross of St George on its ships long before England, but canny English seafarers twigged that if they flew the same flag they would benefit from the protection of the Genoese fleet. And the authorities in Genoa were prepared to tolerate such English impudence as long as the English monarch paid an annual due to Genoa.
Genoa stood for trade, and if a little income could be secured by renting out the cross of St George, Genoa was game. No surprise that when the splenetic Scottish writer Tobias Smollett visited Genoa in 1766, he reported that the city “has the face of business.” This was arguably the most positive comment that Smollett made about anywhere on his entire tour. Smollett was not given to enthusiastic praise of anywhere foreign.
The face of business still colours Genoa life today. Half an hour from Pegli, the Onda Azzurra is running in beside the sparkling new aquarium to the Porto Antico. Slow, slow it creeps in beside the Bigo, a futuristic take on Genoa’s ancient waterfront, modern cigar-shaped booms mimicking the cranes of old. The commuters disembark and head for their workshops and offices, picking their way between the Senegalese sellers of sunglasses, who with quiet precision are just about to start another day’s trading. Hundreds of sunglasses unpacked from green plastic bags and each carefully laid out on matting in the concrete shade of the elevated highway. “Spare a thought for Africa,” says Ousmane as he touts shades under the morning roar of traffic. But no-one spares a thought for Africa.
Sunglasses vendors on Genoa’s waterfront with the Museum of the Sea in the background (photo © hidden europe).
Africans with their green plastic bags are populating the spaces laid waste by decades of bad planning. Fragile lives in a fractured city. True, some of the Genoese themselves have realised that separating the city from its port by a main road may not have been such a fine idea after all. The city that for centuries ignored Columbus rediscovered him just in time to mark the five hundredth anniversary of the explorer’s 1492 voyage. That made people look out to the sea again. They did not like what they saw. So in the years since the 1992 Columbus celebrations, Genoa has tried to redevelop its waterfront as a more attractive space for both locals and tourists. The new aquarium and the Bigo are all part of that grand scheme. And the introduction of a ferry link with Pegli is a big advance too. Some in the city are even daring to suggest the days of the strada sopraelevata are numbered, that the highway that aggressively severs the visual link between the city and its port might be torn down.
The English poet Thomas Gray visited Genoa in 1739, and described the port with the city alleys rising in tiers beyond as “the grandest of theatres.” He saw a harbour “full of fine blue sea, and vessels of all sorts and sizes, some sailing out, some coming in, and other at anchor; and all around palaces and churches, peeping over one another’s heads, gardens and marble terraces full of orange and cypress trees, fountains, and trellis works covered with vines.” Genoa has a way to go to rediscover its old charm, but its gritty edge and unkempt manner still place it in the premier league of engaging European port cities.
