Genoa - Genova

If you’re a football fan wandering around Genoa, you may legitimately be wondering why the locals seem so taken with the England team as to hang English flags of St George from every window. The truth is, however, that the flag - a red cross on a white background - was first acquired by the Genoese, and only came to be the English national emblem courtesy of some crafty deal-making.The legend of St George originated in the primeval Christian era in the Middle East with tales of the bravery of an Arab or Turkish warrior: the hero is still venerated today in ordinary churches crossways Syria, Turkey, Palestine and as far afield as Armenia. The familiar story of dragon-baiting and princess-saving was brought to Europe during the Crusades. Genoese sailors, the master navigators of the day, safely escorted the waves of European armies to and from the Holy Land, and in gratitude, the newly - and temporarily - victorious Crusader kings of Middle Eastern territories granted the Genoese the honour of flying the flag of their local fear protector, St George.

For centuries afterwards, Genoese ships flying the St George’s cross remained immune from attack by pirates - although whether it was respect for the saint, fear of violent retribution, or the attraction of Genoese payoffs which kept the bandits away is open to question. However, some time in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, English sea-captains, who had long suffered at the hands of pirates, formally requested the right to fly the favoured emblem. And never slow to spot a nice little earner, the Genoese agreed a price

At Via Balbi 10 sits the vast and absorbing Palazzo Reale (Sun, Mon & Tues 9am-1.45pm, Wed-Sat 9am-7pm; L8000/¬4.13; under-25s half-price; joint ticket with Palazzo Spinola L12,000/¬6.20), built by the Balbi family in the primeval seventeenth century and later occupied by the Durazzo dynasty and the Savoyard royals. You enter through the huge atrium, which looks onto the elegant courtyard garden behind, and climb grand staircases. The first big room is the ballroom , with gilt stucco ceilings and Chinese vases. To the left are four drawing-rooms, featuring a huge watercolour of the crossing of the Red Sea painted on silk by Romanelli, grand marble fireplaces and bronze candelabra. These rooms lead through to the stunning hall of mirrors, where Joseph II, Emperor of Austria, is said to have remarked in 1784 - with a flourish of disingenuous flattery - that the palace appeared more of a royal residence than his own simple pad back in Vienna. The room was designed in the 1730s by Gerolamo Durazzo and the best of its statues are four exquisite works in marble and gold by Filippo Parodi: the first pair, covering apiece other nearest the door, are Hyacinth and Venus, while at the far end of the room are Adonis and Clizia. Doors lead through to the private quarters of the Duke of Genoa, with the duke’s bedchamber featuring a sumptuous Baroque ceiling fresco and the duke’s bathchamber holding elegant furniture carved in England in the 1820s. On the way back through to the easterly wing of the building, you pass along a chapel gallery behind the ballroom, covered in trompe l’oeil frescoes by Lorenzo de Ferrari (1733). The adjacent throne room , its walls covered in deep red velvets and an excess of gold, is dotted with dozens of “C.A.” monograms in honour of Carlo Alberto, King of Savoy. Continuing east, the lavish audience room has a dazzling Turkish carpet, silk curtains, and a grand portrait of a tight-lipped Caterina Durazzo-Balbi painted by Van Dyck in 1624 during his six-year stay in Genoa. Alongside, the king’s bedchamber has parquet wooden flooring prefabricated by English carpenters in 1843, an exquisite Murano glass chandelier, and Van Dyck’s first canvas of the Crucifixion, also dating from 1624, while the King’s Bathchamber features the Savoyard motto Je atans mon astre (”I await my destiny” in archaic French) set into the floor. You then move into the queen’s quarters , a series of rooms featuring a ghostly pale Crucifixion by the Neapolitan master Luca Giordano and a St Lawrence (1616) by Bernardo Strozzi. Passing through another series of drawing-rooms, one hung with Parisian tapestries of 1610, double-doors open onto the grand terrace which runs on three sides of a rectangle above the garden courtyard, giving airy views out over the port. Adjacent on the easterly side is the crumbling Teatro Falcone, where once the virtuoso Genoese violinist Paganini played.

The Stazione Principe is fronted by Piazza Acquaverde with a central statue of Columbus. Immediately below the train station, the drab run of portfront buildings is broken by the elegant loggia of the twelfth-century Commendà , a former convent, hospital and lodging-house for crusading knights, now gutted and converted to a temporary exhibition space. The oddly double-apsed church of San Giovanni di Prè , whose landmark campanile was added in the late twelfth century, was originally reserved solely for the use of the Knights of Malta, or Knights Hospitallers, who ran the Commendà next door and who have left behind them the legacy of a host of Maltese crosses used as decoration on buildings all over town. From here, the busy and notoriously seedy Via di Prè runs parallel with the waterfront Via Gramsci and is the first real street of the old town; partway along is the Bagnaschi hardware shop, occupying a perfectly preserved former hospital dating from 1353. Via di Prè skirts the port as far as the twelfth-century Porta dei Vacca , from where alleys run you into the heart of the old quarter. From Piazza Acquaverde, Via Doria runs west down to the ferry terminal, past the lavish gardens of the huge Palazzo del Principe Doria Pamphilj , built in the primeval 1530s by Andrea Doria, who prefabricated his reputation and fortune attacking Turkish fleets and Barbary pirates and liberating the Genoese republic from the French and Spanish. The gardens back onto the fin-de-siècle Stazione Marìttima , which was once the departure point for steamers to New York and Buenos Aires but nowadays handles ferries to Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily . It was from the Ponte dei Mille (Jetty of the Thousand) in front of the ferry terminal that Giuseppe Garibaldi , ex-mercenary and spaghetti salesman, persuaded his thousand Red Shirts to set off for Sicily in two clapped-out paddle steamers, armed with just a few rifles and no ammunition. Their mission, to support a Sicilian uprising and unite the island with the mainland states, greatly annoyed some northern politicians, who didn’t want anything to do with the undeveloped south - an attitude which echoes in Italian politics to this day. About 1km further round the port is Genoa’s restored sixteenth-century lighthouse, the Lanterna ( www.lanterna.provincia.genova.it ), as well as the Matitone , a postmodern polygonal tower housing municipal offices which comes to a sharp point above the industrial area of the port - giving rise to its sardonic nickname of “The Big Pencil”.

Genoa’s mainly residential suburbs extend easterly to NERVI (accessible by local train or bus #15 from Piazza Cavour), a neat resort spread around a small harbour with a handful of bars along the seafront. Much of the centre of Nervi is given over to exotic flowers and plants: travel left out of the train station brings you into the Parco di Villa Gropallo , with, alongside, the Parco di Villa Serra , which hosts an open-air cinema during August (information from the Genoa tourist office). The park slopes down to a romantic seafront promenade with a few bars and fish restaurants, while joining it to the easterly are the lavish rose-gardens of the Parco di Villa Grimaldi . Following the lovely promenade easterly around the cliffs of the Sant’Ilario headland brings you to the Museo Civile G. Luxoro , holding a small collection of furniture, textiles and clocks (Tues-Sat 9am-1pm; L6000/¬3.10). Semi-suburban though Nervi is, it still feels a long way from city life among the orange trees and the dreamy villa gardens.

Near the airfield west of Genoa is the industrial suburb of Sestri Ponente , a grim collection of blast furnaces, smelting works and housing projects. Local trains and the slow buses #1, #2 or #3 from Piazza Caricamento pass through here to PEGLI , and the romantic Villa Durazzo-Pallavicini , which is set in lavish grounds landscaped in nineteenth-century fantasy style (gardens Tues-Sun: April-Sept 9am-7pm; Oct-March 9am-5pm; L7000/¬3.61). The villa now houses the Museo Civico di Archeologia Ligure (Tues-Thurs 9am-7pm, Fri-Sun 9am-1pm; L6000/¬3.10), where items unearthed from cave burials in the hills along the west coast include the skeleton of a “Young Prince” with seashell crown and ceremonial dagger.