It's Friday the Thirteenth and in some countries that's considered unlucky. But I'm not in one of those countries today so I'm safe! If you live in one, just keep hiding under the bed till it's over.
Tomorrow is Valentine's Day, which is a sort of commercial Licence to Love day. Years ago I went for a Valentine's dinner with my then partner to a local restaurant where we knew the food was good. And it was. Except that the place was packed and so it was busier, noisier and pricier than usual and, as a consequence, not very romantic. I vowed I'd not try the experiment again. But, hey, you do it your way.
The heart-shaped box of chocolates here was at Romanengo's chocolate shop in Genoa. Love has a price here: 88 euros to be precise. Eep!
Today's title is not a lesser known quote from Donald Rumsfeld (remember him?) but relates to more things from my recent trip to Genoa ...
Historic shops
Genoa has over 100 historic shops which house ancient businesses, some of them 200 and more years old, from butchers to bookshops. Romanengo above is one and here are some others I spotted that haven't already been posted.
Café
Stationers
Cakes
Rubber stamps
In addition, some ancient buildings house new chain stores, like OVS that sells cheap clothing but is in an old palace. It's odd to browse the racks and come across this fountain with a heroic statue of Hercules clobbering the Hydra.
Hercules famously wore a lion-skin cloak (and not much else) and here he is surrounded by cheap jeans! This sort of incongruity appeals to me.
Jeans
Talking of jeans, the garment originates in Genoa and is an anglicization of the French name for the city, Gênes. I wrote about the development of jeans here a few years ago: Jeans, the garment that made the modern world.
St George
And talking of incongruity, there's a story that the English flag, which is identical to the Genoese flag, was borrowed from Genoa by King Richard the Lionheart in the late 12th century when he went off on crusade.
I say borrowed. The story is that the Genoese, with one of the largest navies of the time, let English crusader ships use their flag when sailing through the Mediterranean to afford them more protection. King Richard had to pay for the privilege and then subsequent kings seem to have forgotten this nicety. Some or all of this may be Ye Medievalle Fayke Newes. St George is a military saint who appealed to crusaders and medieval soldiers generally.
You have to wonder at contemporary English nationalists' possessive obsession with St George and his flag. Given that Saint George came from Cappadocia in what is now Turkey, fought in the Roman army, allegedly killed a dragon in Libya and was buried in what is now Israel; is also the patron saint of Ethiopia and, of course, Georgia (the country named after him, not the US state), and one of the patrons of Portugal; is a saint in Islam as well as Christianity; and killed a dragon, which was a favourite Anglo-Saxon symbol. There's nothing English about him at all. You don't have to be dim to be nationalist, but it certainly helps.
St George is painted on the beautiful palace that used to be the government house here.
Sadly, 1960s urban planning being what it was, they put a flyover right in front of this building.
It's by the harbour, which was revamped in 1992 for the 500th anniversary of Columbus's first voyage and has a lot of modern attractions such as the aquarium and the maritime museum, both very large. I saw these in 2019 so I didn't repeat my visits this time but they are excellent. There's also this warship, the Neptune, which is not old but was built for 8 million dollars in 1980s money for Roman Polanski's movie Pirates. I hadn't heard of it ... apparently the film, despite (or maybe because of) its being a comedic tribute to pirate movies of yore, was a flop.
That concludes my sightseeing. I
liked Genoa's competent and cheap public transport system, including its
single-line metro that takes you to all the main points in the city
centre. I'll go back when it's warmer as I'd quite like to take some of the funiculars that hoist you up the steep hillsides of the city, and visit the Great Wall of Genoa, which is the strongest and longest city wall in Europe.
Next week, though, under the principle of saving the best till last, I'll be concluding my thoughts on Genoa with a few paragraphs on the city's centuries-old trans community and the trans ghetto.
Two rulings in favour of trans people. And spring is on the way.
Italy
Italy is a bit behind other EU nations in its trans rights. However, A court in Avezzano, Central Italy, has accepted that a young petitioner may change the name and sex marking on his birth certificate without the need for medical transition such as hormone therapy. The non-binary person, who has requested anonymity following online abuse, seems to be the first to be acknowledged in this way. Until now it was expected that a person would transition via the medical route before their gender was accepted and documents altered.
This is good news and marks a step closer to gender self-declaration in Italy. However, this is a local court and there could be contradictory rulings elsewhere in future that would require an overarching ruling or guidance from a higher court.
UN Council of Europe
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, an agency of the United Nations that aims to uphold human rights, democracy and the rule of law, has voted decisively to call on its 46 member states to ban conversion therapy against LGBTQ+ people. Some countries have already banned the practice but Italy and the UK have yet to do so.
The great Roman writer Varro stated in his manual on agriculture that spring in the Mediterranean begins on February 7th*. Which was last Saturday. It wasn't actually the nicest of days as we still had the tail end of the lousy weather system that's been drenching much of Western Europe for some weeks. Nevertheless, I went to Nice for the Saturday markets. When there's a leaden sky over the French riviera, the water inshore takes on the most unusual
glowing pale turquoise colour. None of my photo devices can do it
justice but this gives a bit of an idea.
The Saturday book market in the square in front of the courthouse sells not just old books but also records, posters, paintings and similar. I loved both Tintin and Star Wars as a child and I couldn't resist this mock Tintin book cover!
Additionally, Luggy the LGBT Crab, who often accompanies me on my travels, has a new companion, a blue lobster.
(Incidentally, readers insisted that I name the bat corkscrew I got for Christmas. I've decided on Ozzy, for reasons that should be ozvious. And that's the first and last time I name any of my kitchen utensils!)
It's now decidedly warmer and sunnier and I have got an itch to do some spring cleaning and gardening this week. I've set to it with a will with my rubber gloves and apron on!
More curious local culture
Last week I mentioned the Codfish Race in Cantalupo. This coming Saturday is the "Belli e Brutti" (Handsome and Ugly) Carneval in the village of Suvero where people dress either in colourful outfits with bells and ribbons or in dark, shaggy costumes with blackened faces and horns. They knock on doors and, whilst the man of the house prepares refreshments for the, er, guests, the Belli dance with the womenfolk as the Brutti stand by and make sarcastic remarks. No one has any idea how old this festival is but a pagan origin seems highly likely. Do the Belli and Brutti symbolise good and evil, or spring and winter, or something else? No-one knows. Apparently, the costumes are often handed down from generation to generation. Maybe the Belli outfits gave Boy George some of his inspiration?
Enjoy the Winter Olympics if you're watching. 16 different effortful ways to slide around in the cold! It makes me want a holiday in the tropics!
* Marcus Terentius Varro,De Re Rustica, Book I, chapter 28. I give this reference so you know it's not an internet or AI or conspiracy nut 'fact'.
More on my recent visit to Genoa, including palaces, big dresses, food and music. But this is a trans blog so I don't just post holiday snaps: there's a lot on lovely clothes and female roles, too.
Genoa was once capital of a republic run by wealthy merchants and bankers, with a far reach. Genoese merchants traded all over the Mediterranean and the Near East, the bankers lent money to kings and emperors. And all these rich families - such as the Dorias, the Spinolas, the Grimaldis (who are still rulers of Monaco) - built themselves fine palaces, mainly in the 16th century, and filled them with stuff. There were more than 100 such residences in the city centre. These are the Rolli Palaces, so called because their owners were put on a roll and had to take it in turns to host visiting foreign dignitaries, ambassadors and the like in their fancy homes.
Many are along a single street, packed together, in as much as you can pack palaces together!
Via Garibaldi, Genoa, formerly Via Nuova, with some of the Rolli palaces. This style of architecture had a huge influence on the rest of Europe in the 16th - 18th centuries.
Most of these are now banks, the Chamber of Commerce, the City Hall and so on.
Half a dozen can now be visited daily, but at
certain times of year they hold "Rolli Days", that is weekends when 42 palaces can
be visited, mostly for free. You'll never see them all over a Rolli Day
weekend so booking is complicated and you have to pick which you want to
visit and the time you'll be there. I stuck to those on daily
view, which are impressive enough and form a large complex of art galleries, which I won't go into in detail about except that they have plenty of works from the Flemish, Dutch, German, Spanish and French schools as well as Italian paintings, and some incredible ceilings. Rubens lived in Genoa for a while and a lot of his work is here.
"Venus and Mars: and allegory of intemperance" by Peter Paul Rubens. Doesn't this just sum up an evening in a trans club so well?
Palazzo Bianchi had a temporary exhibition of Victorian dresses, which I confess I lingered over.
Heliotrope or mint? So hard to choose.
Mind you, I'm not sure I'd want to live with one of these dollies staring at me, however fun they might be to dress!
Just a few items on view that provoked thought.
The Victorian dresses were all for grand ladies. By contrast, here is one of Pieter Aertsen's famous paintings of maids (this one's from 1559; I had no idea it was here).
Wrongly
called "the Cook" (because cooks were men), scullery maids like this had a certain, erm,
reputation and artworks again and again drop little hints: the open
oyster shells, the glazed pot on its side, the chamber pot and its stool right in the kitchen, and the many
plucked birds rammed on a spit. She looks at you out of the corner of her eye, inviting you to
understand the message! There's so much of this sly, saucy, jokey stuff
from the 16th to 18th centuries here. Pills to purge melancholy, they
would have called them. So, you saucy trans maids, your real-world sisters have a long history!
This by Veronese (supposedly) troubled me with all this Epstein stuff going on. Susannah and the Elders is a story from the apocryphal parts of the book of Daniel in the Bible, where Susannah is spied on my two high-ranking men when she's taking a bath. They make advances, she rebuffs them, they falsely accuse her of adultery and she faces execution, but the truth wins out in the end. The leering stone satyr behind her looks, purely coincidentally yet very aptly, like Rolf Harris, a dirty old man of our own era. Creepy, victim-blaming men go back a long way.
Anyway, there's nicer stuff, too. Here for Lynn and other dog lovers is a nice pair of doggies looking as friendly and curious as when they were painted nearly 500 years ago:
And for Michelle and other bunny lovers, here's a family of rabbits by Albert Cuyp (1620-91):
Food
That's enough high art (or sly art) for now. I'm an omnivore and I eat pretty much anything and when I go away I like to try local dishes. I understand the appeal of chain restaurants where you know what you're going to get and how much you're going to pay for it but I am curious, I prefer to be adventurous and I like to support small businesses in preference to multinationals. So I tried a variety of local dishes in small eateries. I've linked to the restaurants but only one has a bit of English on its website.
This was the most curious thing I had:
It's cannoli biscuits, which are hollow like brandy snaps and are usually a dessert filled with cream or mascarpone cheese with nuts and candied fruit. Here, however, they are filled with a cod and ricotta cheese mix, topped with caramelised onions that look like anchovies, with tomato sauces made from three different colours of tomatoes, and pistachio nuts. It's the fashion these days to have contrasting textures and tastes in the same dish and this was a mixture of hard, sweet biscuit and nuts with soft, savoury filling and toppings. Not unpleasant but a bit unusual.
In the same place, Locanda Spinola, I also had an amazing type pf pasta I've not had before, known as guitar strings, which are more like plump bootstraps, dyed black with squid ink and with a sauce of tomatoes, olives and chopped octopus, which I didn't photograph as I know some readers are sensitive to alien tentacular things. Really delicious, though, and hard to eat without flicking sauce everywhere. But I am a skilled pasta operator now so there was no mess.
I also tried another local speciality, pansoti, which are pasta parcels filled with borage and herbs and served with walnut sauce. Delicious but very filling. These were at the excellent Buca di San Matteo.
I had a bad experience last time I was in Genoa two years ago and the lunch I had in a famous and highly recommended place that the locals frequent was abominable. Well, not quite all of it: the Diet Coke was OK. So I was a bit dubious about a similar rough-and-ready looking trattoria, Il Fabbro, that also came highly recommended. But this place worked out more than all right. The tagliatelle pasta strips with beef ragù were excellent. It takes hours to make a proper ragù sauce and I think they'd put the work in. Vitello tonnato is thin slices of roast veal with tuna and mustard mayonnaise (which sounds odd but trust me, it works) and traditionally it comes with the veal hidden under the mayo but here the slices were beautifully arranged in a circle with a blob of thick home-made tuna-mustard-mayo on each ...and it tasted incredible. Excellent lunch, all for €26, so no complaints about the price either. Top marks here.
When looking for a home in the region in 2019 I spent three days in Genoa and I really liked L'Opera restaurant. Sadly, it seems to have dropped its standards and is catering more for tourist tastes. When I got my pasta this time, the sauce had cream in it. Authentic Italian sauces never have cream in them. In fact, if you are served a creamy pasta sauce you should ask your waiter/waitress very nicely and politely if you could see one of the excellent pans they made it in. Follow them into the kitchen and take the proffered pan. Ideally, it will be a large, heavy one. Grip the handle firmly and apply the base of the pan squarely and repeatedly to the chef's head. If it's a good, resonant pan the sound should be quite pleasing, like a bell ringing on a coconut.
Never put cream in Italian sauce, Luigi. You're not French.
Talking of heady music ...
For all the fine art and holy relics about the town, in my view, the most precious thing in Genoa is in the City Hall, itself one of the Rolli palaces.
The Paganini rooms contain memorabilia of history's greatest violinist, local boy Niccolò Paganini. Actually, he was possibly the greatest musician ever (save only the legendary Orpheus). There, in the last room, is the "Cannone", the Cannon, his favourite and most used violin, an object so famous and venerable that it has its own bodyguards and only the winners of the international Paganini Prize may play it.
"Il Cannone", front and back. You can see where the great man's chin has worn away the varnish, the little nicks and scratches. Made by Guarneri in Cremona in 1743.
Prizewinning violinist Francesca Dego tells us about it, and how it feels to play it, physically and emotionally, in this five-minute video from her recording label:
I am not a musician but I was awed by this 300-year-old legendary instrument.
Its replica, the Sivori, made in Paris in 1834 at Paganini's request after he'd broken the Cannone (butterfingers!) is also there. You can select recordings of each instrument.
Many thanks to the maintenance staff who needed to do something but patiently waited for me to stop gawping before closing the room.
If violins are not your thing, Paganini was also a leading guitarist, and here is a signed one of his.
Paganini's signature on the left
The Cannone was a stunning thing to find and if I'd seen nothing else it alone would have made the whole trip worthwhile. It's an awesome piece of still-living history.
Modern statue of Paganini outside the Carlo Felice Theatre, one of Italy's main opera houses
We certainly have a lot of top fiddlers in our era, too. Sadly, not the musical sort.
That'll do for this episode of Sue's Travels. Thanks for reading. Have a nice weekend. If you can, wear something pretty to beat the winter blues. And listen to music that uplifts you, from any great musician you admire. I think musicians, artists, writers, dressmakers and other creatives do more for the good of mankind than almost any other professional.
The weather's been very wet lately and every time it rains hard, we get a new hole scoured into the street, someone's garden wall crumbles, the beach washes away or a tree falls down. The land in Italy is dynamic, never resting, always pushing up, collapsing and being remoulded by nature. You'll probably have seen the distressing pictures from Niscemi in Sicily as a 4km long landslip pulls the town apart. Here in the Alps a dainty stream can turn into raging flood overnight and whole mountainsides can come crashing down. In fact, one road through the mountains here has a gigantic rock on it right now. The melting of the permafrost that binds the rocks together in the high Alps isn't helping either and several mountain tops have collapsed in the last few years. But you don't live here without accepting this reality.
I have my clothes drying indoors today. Because of the rain, obviously, but I'm partly glad of that because the little boy next door keeps looking under the partition between our properties and must be wondering who the strange lady is. No-one, dearie, just your local TGirl hanging out her smalls. Except kids blab to their parents about things that are not as expected. Little ICE-agents in the making, every one of them! What a pest!
Slimmer
Anyway, the other thing that's coming down is my weight. In January I lost over 5 kilos (that's 11 pounds) so I've got rid of the Christmas excess, and more. Having no wine throughout January helped most and, although it's deemed quite antisocial here not to have a glass with a meal, I have been firm about it with neighbours and waiters. Thankfully, the much harsher drink-driving laws they've recently introduced here have seen more people drinking soft drinks, which is not necessarily better health-wise but it means there's less pressure to have booze. Added to that, my food delivery van brings me loads of ready prepared vegetables and soup mixes that really help. If eating out, I tend to stick to seafood because it contains so little fat. And it's very fresh here so that's a double win.
My weight loss campaign that's threaded its way into my blog throughout its history is in a new phase now, at last, because I start each year with a bit less weight than the previous year, but now I see that my ideal, healthy weight is more clearly in sight than ever before and those cutesy little dresses I've stored carefully might well be able to make an appearance again in a few months.
Now if that isn't an incentive then I don't know what is!
Putting up
It's never dull here and locally they are setting up the annual Lemon Festival in Menton, Nice is readying for its carnival and Sanremo is preparing for the national Music Festival. There are the Winter Olympics further up the Alps, of course. It's all good fun but you can't do anything normal with city centres blocked off for a fortnight and businesses charging too much. As in previous years, I'm going to go away at the height of the chaos!
However, I'm sure you'll agree with me that far more culturally significant than all this big-city razzmatazz is the annual Stockfish Race in the village of Cantalupo, west of Genoa. Each team of two gets a 1 kilo piece of stockfish, i.e. dried cod, and they have to throw it through or onto targets dotted around the village. Every target needs a different skillset: underarm toss, overarm bowling, boomeranging the codfish around corners ... And if you miss, you have to collect your stray fish from ravines, rooftops and so on. I'm not sure what the rules are if your fish disintegrates!
If that's too fast-paced for you, don't worry: Cantalupo has an annual Snail Festival every autumn.
I'm back home after a winter break to the city of Genova (or Genoa in English). Both medieval city and huge modern port, with more palaces per square metre than anywhere else, a musical powerhouse, one-time capital of a potent empire and embracing a centuries-old trans community.
I was here in 2019 when looking to settle in the region, and again for an exhibition in 2024. This time I went for the historical treasures, another big art exhibition, the shopping and the food. It's full of historic shops, some housing the same businesses for 200+ years, and noted for its fab vintage clothes boutiques. Street food outlets sit next to upmarket cafés selling classic Genoese cakes. In fact, it's a tangle of old and modern, rich and poor, smart and shabby, all cheek by jowl. Fascinating chaos that somehow works.
I saw so much in three days that I'll write about it over several posts and mix it up so that it reflects the nature of the place. Click to enlarge photos.
Piazza De Ferrari, the city's main square, that houses the regional government, the opera house, the former Doge's palace and modern banks.
Cold weather gear
It was very cold for these parts, with snow on the Apennines above town. My favourite wear these days are some really soft, comfortable women's cotton slacks (with pockets!) but they're not warm so tights and/or leggings were essential underneath. I have some comfortable thermal tops from M&S and I invested in some from Tezenis whilst there. Note for readers from English-speaking countries, on the European continent, shops that specialise exclusively in lingerie and hosiery are a common thing.
Typical old Genoese lingerie boutique
Moby Dick
I went with the excuse of seeing the Moby Dick exhibition at the Doge's Palace. Partly a celebration of the Pelagos Whale Sanctuary that occupies the Ligurian Sea and beyond, it was based around Melville's remarkable book, which I hardly call a novel because of it's blend of factual descriptions of the bloody and dangerous business of catching and butchering whales, its mysticism, its symbolism and its Biblical parallels, its social satire and irreverent take on law, politics and market forces, its sly sexual undertones, its nods to other writers from Shakespeare to Rabelais... A bit of a messy exhibition of old and new artworks, harpoons and telescopes, whale lore and random related stuff that, although eclectic like the book, lacked its coherence.
"Jonah and the Whale" by David Teniers the Younger (c. 1640).
"Mae Day IX (Whe)" by Cosima von Bonin. A stuffed whale toy on a swing with a hip flask etched with the words "Oy Vey". No explanation. Luggy the Crab did feel an affinity for this one, though.
A bit of polemic now. This is what annoys me about modern art exhibitions: (1) These piles of material are works on display and to show them they have hidden the stunningly intricate and exquisite plasterwork of the room behind bare chipboard walls and lighting gantries. (2) Art does not repeat the visible but makes visible, as Paul Klee opined. But you can't propose this kind of art without inviting comparison with the genius, the thought, the care and the labour that goes into other art forms. Compare these piles of stuff with the figures and the palm tree in the work below, with every frond and lock of hair delicately carved from a single block of marble in a nearby church. I boggle at sculptor's skill and care: one slip and the whole thing would have been ruined. As Klee says, you don't have to replicate living things, especially not this intricately, to be a good artist, but piling up junk and expecting praise for it is a bit much.
Christ and St Peter by Michele San Sebastiano (1896) in the church of Santa Maria delle Vigne, Genoa.
So I left with mixed feelings about that show. There are greater treasures below.
Tea and cake
There are few nations that have understood coffee like the Italians have, and Italian-style coffee - espresso, cappuccino, macchiato, moca - dominates today's hot beverage market. To give credit where credit is due, the small, concentrated coffee we call espresso that is the basis of Italian coffee drinks was borrowed from the Turks when troops from the Kingdom of Sardinia, of which Genoa was a part, fought alongside Turks in the Crimean War. That and cigarettes, for which the locals still have quite a fondness.
By contrast, apart from Marco Polo and Sonia Gandhi, no Italian has ever had anything to do with tea-growing nations. So I've never had a good cup of tea in Italy. Not once. That is, until yesterday when I went into the Signor Kiwi café and had a nice plump fresh croissant and a pot of real loose-leaf tea. I was stunned. So lots and lots and lots of points to them. They're just off the main square behind the Doge's palace.
Signor Kiwi Bistrot from their Facebook page
Hot drinks were generally in order to fight the cold. I don't drink coffee any more but another thing they do well here is hot chocolate. Italian hot chocolate can be very think, almost like pudding you could eat with a spoon. Delicious ones were at the Caffè dei Musei, with a lovely slice of cherry tart, and the very special one at the ancient Pietro Romanengochocolate shop that was unique (mind you, I should hope so for the price).
This is one of the 100+ ancient shops of Genoa. More on those later.
Genoese cake, i.e. the sponge cake which often has buttercream or lemon icing/frosting on top, is based on a local recipe but it's actually less well known here than elsewhere. Two doors down from Pietro Romanengo is the Klainguti bakery established 1828 which specialises in this cake, or "Torta Zena" as it's known here (Zena is the local dialect name for Genoa).
This sort of cake is the basis for much French baking, like Proust's madeleine. More cakes from the same baker ...
Apart from the two pastries I've mentioned, I was very good and had no other cake. I did have some very good savoury food, though, and we'll come to that.
Relics, devil's chess and silversmithing
The cathedral is typical medieval Italian "bathing costume" style.
Inside, one half is gothic, the other half baroque jazziness. A dark corner houses a huge navy shell that thankfully failed to explode in 1941 or it would have destroyed the whole building. Outside, the north wall has bits of Roman tomb embedded in it, and a chessboard five metres up the wall under the window. How it got there is the stuff of many legends, some literally and metaphorically diabolical. These days I suspect only the local drunks try to play on it.
But I also wanted to see the cathedral treasury which has some revered relics and their beautiful containers.
This is their most precious item, a bowl believed to have been cut from emerald and that was said to have been either the container for the paschal lamb at the Last Supper, or the cup in which Nicodemus collected Jesus's blood on the cross, or even the Holy Grail itself. Napoleon stole it, his minions found it was made of glass and modern scholarship thinks it is Islamic from around the year 1000. Still, it's rather beautiful and has an impressive history.
The whole treasury museum in the cathedral basement was designed in the 1960s with this relic as the template for the layout with its lobes and side chambers, which reminded me of the creepy monastery library in Umberto Eco's medieval detective novel, The Name of the Rose.
The silverware there is quite stunning. The reliquaries contain items believed to be strands of the Virgin Mary's hair, a spine from the Crown of Thorns, the ashes of St John the Baptist, the forearm of St James and more. The quality of the craftsmanship is unequivocal and the precious stones are worth ... a lot.
Intricately worked and highly detailed silver chest for carrying the ashes of St John the Baptist in processions through town.
Silver and jewelled tree surrounding a tiny glass bubble containing hair believed to have been that of the Virgin Mary
Roman
onyx plate with 15th-century French gold surround, said to be the plate
on which the head of St John the Baptist was presented to Salome.
These are great treasures indeed, but not in my opinion the greatest, which is a musical one. More on that later.
Vintage clothing
Genoa has a particular specialism in vintage clothes shops which, of course, are a haven for TGirls. Betty Page Boudoir is highly thought of, but there are plenty of others, like Lipstick Vintage (sadly closed for the afternoon when I came to it).
There are also interesting old clothing items (among much other stuff) in the antiques market in an old palace. As shopping locations go, this is quite impressive.
There's more vintage clothing and a lot of nice jewellery, old and new, on the stalls in the glass-roofed arcade off the main square, too.
The Catholic church disapproves of trans people. Men are men and women are women, they say. This man in skirts here is a Catholic priest. Go figure.
Oh, Columbus! what have you done?
The most famous Genoese was Christopher Columbus. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Genoa was capital of a powerful maritime empire. Not much land, but dominant on the Mediterranean, Black and even Caspian Seas. The Genoese forts of Crimea are a Unesco world heritage site. Important goods came to Europe via the Silk Roads from China, India and the East generally and the Italian maritime republics like Genoa saw it got to Europe from Western Asia, but as Turkish power increased, trade became harder with this new middleman in the way. Columbus thought he'd go west not east and so cut them out of trade arrangements but the Genoese government wasn't convinced by his proposal. He did manage to persuade the neighbouring Mediterranean empire of Aragon to fund his expedition, suggesting a cheeky ten per cent cut for himself of any resources he discovered. King Ferdinand of Aragon didn't expect him to return so he went with the proposal. The rest, as they say, is history. And Columbus became one of the wealthiest men in history as a result. Donald, you have a lot to learn about business.
Do read the log of Columbus's first voyage if you can. The original text and its copies haven't survived but a summary by Bartolomé de las Casas does and it seems clear that Columbus actually kept two logs, one carefully recording his ships' actual progress and location, the other a fraudulent one recording different speeds to persuade his crew to put more effort in, and different locations as it was illegal for him to be in the waters he went to, which were reserved for the Portuguese by treaty. His contemporary, Machiavelli, the political theorist, would have regarded this as the normal way of statecraft. But we live in more honest times, don't we. (Don't we?)
My speculation on what might have been if Genoa, an aristocratic republic of bankers and merchants, had governed the Americas and not Spain (i.e. the union of Aragon and Castile) is based on what has happened in other colonies that have been put into the hands of other very wealthy individuals, like the Welser family of Augsburg who were bankers to the Holy Roman Emperors and were granted Little Venice (Venezuela/Guyana) and exploited it pretty ruthlessly in the 1530s and '40s, inviting speculation on the legends of El Dorado, or King Leopold II of Belgium's notoriously brutal personal fiefdom of the Congo in the late 19th Century. Things might therefore have been even worse for American natives than they were under the Spanish conquistadores.
Anyway, digression over, Columbus's birthplace can still be seen. A small medieval house with little in it, that was partly damaged in the French bombardment of 1684.
It's by the medieval gateway on one side ...
... and a huge modern scooter park on the other.
The cluster of buildings and tunnel in the bakground are classic fascist architecture from the interwar years.
You're nobody if you don't own a scooter in this region.
I don't own a scooter.
More to come soon: savoury food, the incredible Rolli palaces, pirates, top musicians, shopping in old and new style, a tangle of streets, the grand new harbours ...
