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!
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| 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.
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| "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? |
The website is here: Rolli Palaces
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| Hall of Mirrors, Palazzo Spinola |
Palazzo Bianchi had a temporary exhibition of Victorian dresses, which I confess I lingered over.
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| 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.
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| "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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
Sue x
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