Genoa: From the City to the World
The former city-state and birthplace of Christopher Columbus has long been a global city.
Genoa, 'La Superba', the former city-state that once rivalled Venice for control of the Mediterranean, commands a magnificent, if precarious, position overlooking the harbour which brought the Black Death to medieval Europe and honed the seafaring skills of Christopher Columbus. Nowadays it is a grizzled working port with a wonderfully claustrophobic, if graffiti-ridden, baroque heart. Like all Italian cities, it has more churches and pallazi crammed with paintings – Caravaggios, Veroneses, Strozzis – than it knows what to do with; but, more than any other place in la bella Italia, it is and has long been a global city, as I found out on a visit in July.
The role of Columbus in shrinking our world, for better or worse, is well known, but the story of the 19th-century Italians who followed him to the New World – primarily from Genoa – is not. Their story is told with élan and humanity in the city's wonderful Museo del Mare, constructed in the old docks, which have been given new life by the architect Renzo Piano, a son of Genoa. In it, one enters the booths where Italians, who remained impoverished despite reunification, were lured by the call of the shipping companies that offered them the chance of a new life, for a price, in the US, Brazil and Argentina, then a booming young country, full of promise. We follow them to the ship's barrack-style dormitories, separated by gender, the women cramped together with their children, where disease spread rapidly among the primitive sanitation facilities. We see the tables where they ate in shifts, without knives for fear of violence. We embark with them to the coffee estates of Brazil and the slums of Buenos Aires, as well as Ellis Island, New York, from where names such as Sinatra, Scorsese, Ciccone and Coppola would resonate worldwide.
Genoa's tale is not just one of export and emigration, but of imports and immigrants, too. Among them were the Britons attracted to the city in the 19th century, when it became an important coal station on the way to Suez. In 1893 a group of them founded the Genoa Cricket Club, which in 1896 added the word 'Foot-ball' to its name, becoming the first football club in Italy, a nation which has won the World Cup three times more than England. Its story is told in the portside Museo della storia del Genoa (retaining the English spelling, 'Genova' in Italian). To this day, Italian football managers are addressed as 'Mister'.
Paul Lay is editor of History Today.
