Genovian Jetsam

Genoa is one of those Italian cities that, steeped in history as it is, is generally off the tourist track and remains all the more wonderful for that.  It is a working city; the bustle is characteristically Italian, but being a northern metropolis it has a distinct edge of more urgent, cooler Latin  efficiency.

It was for over a millennia the archetypal city-state and it’s former wealth is apparent in the abundance of it’s renaissance set pieces and there is nothing more life-affirming, than strolling down the Via Garibaldi in the early evening luxuriating in the opera music drifting down that sedate, narrow street.


Yet it is still a city ‘in business;’ a frenetic expressway may separate the city centre from it’s port but there is always Corsa Italia beyond the Fiera de Genova, where you can sunbath on the rocks that cascade into the Mediterranean and promenade in the fashion of any traditional Italian seaside resort.  Then there is the medieval warren of alleys and dead-ends to [quite literally] lose yourself in, in the old city.  I have had a love of this city for over twenty years; it has more balls than Venice, more architecture than Milan and more culture than Rome [ancient, unused relics don’t count].
                                         
It was in the marina behind the Fiera that I saw a yacht moored called ‘The Mordant Choice,’ and in a shoe shop, was served by a young man who snapped out of a languid indifference into amazingly deft efficiency, as he expertly packed a pair of shoes and elaborately gift wrapped them by moving nothing more than his hands, whilst puffing on a cigarette hanging lazily from his mouth [remember those glorious days, when even shop assistants smoked?]. 

It was in a dangerously over-packed club along the Via Giacomo Buranello that I first saw Music Entablature.  The Via GB is a scruffy street in a grimy part of town by the port, distinctive in that for most of it length, it’s north side is a large wall/viaduct punctuated by occasional road tunnels, along the top of which the metro lines run.   The experience was electrifying; the euro-electronica clash with 70s glamstomp was original, utterly bonkers and complete genius.  We left the club- where sweat was quite literally running down the walls- a few pound lighter in weight and exhilarated, strolling through the dark streets of Genoa’s seedier underside, filled with a lost innocence that had as its cornerstone the belief that Ziggy Stardust really could save the world, that European integration is a reality worth working for rather than  a dream to ponder and dismiss, and that Genoa is perhaps one of the most under-rated of European cities, an urban gem in which we may just be transitory flotsam and jetsam in it’s timeline, but we are all the more enriched for being so no matter how inconsequential our own impact has been.