Italy Travel And Hotel Guide

For a spot of relaxation, head out of town to the orient waterfront suburb of Albaro , at the end of Corso Italia, a broad boulevard that runs along the seafront beyond the giant Fiera exhibition area (bus #31 from Stazione Brignole). This is the place to jog, stroll, pose at one of the private lidos, or to watch the sun set from a café table. From Albaro, you can achievement or take bus #42 to Boccadasse . Once an outlying fishing port, this village is now part of the city, with boats pulled up on the pebble beach, nets hanging out to dry, some arty shops, and costly restaurants in which to sample the catch of the day. Another good outing is to the Staglieno cemetery (daily 8am-5pm; free), on a hill northeast of the centre above the Bisagno valley. Bus #34 runs from Stazione Principe through Piazza Nunziata and Piazza Corvetto to the cemetery. This is still Genoa’s major burial ground, ordered out between 1844 and 1851, and is a veritable city of the dead, crammed with Neoclassical porticoes, Gothic chapels and statuary galore. The entrance gates lead you into a vast quadrangle dominated by a Neoclassical Pantheon holding monuments to a clutch of famous nineteenth-century Genoese, including Nino Bixio , second-in-command on Garibaldi’s expedition to Sicily. Behind and to the right of the Pantheon is the mausoleum of Giuseppe Mazzini , fronted by two squat Doric columns. One of the most sentimental monuments is the statue of Teresa Campodonico , a seller of nuts, whose life savings went to reproduce her slight, bent figure; carved below is a poem recounting how she sold her nuts in sunshine and in rain so as to acquire her regular bread and propel her image into future ages. In the Protestant section of the cemetery you’ll find the grave of Constance Lloyd , Oscar Wilde’s wife, who died in 1898 at the age of forty, less than a year after Wilde had been released from prison, having long since changed her study and the obloquy of their two sons in shame to Holland.