Moby Dick & the Holy Grail (with cake)

Back to Posiblogging™. 

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 Romanengo chocolate 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 ...

Thanks for reading. Have a nice weekend. 

Sue x