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South Of San Lorenzo
The section of the old town south of the Cattedrale di San Lorenzo is less visited than the attraction-packed districts to the north, and more residential. Many of Genoa’s students and young professionals live in the upper floors of the old buildings lining Via dei Giustiniani and Via San Bernardo, generating a lively bar-culture in the surrounding alleys. From the cathedral and Piazza Matteotti, narrow Salita Pollaiuoli plunges you into the gloom between high buildings down to a crossroads with Via San Bernardo , a long, straight thoroughfare built by the Romans and now one of Genoa’s most characterful old-town streets, with grocers and bakers trading behind the portals of palaces decorated in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. On the south side of the crossroads is tiny Piazza San Donato , a quiet square overlooked by the church of San Donato, whose decorous octagonal Byzantine-style campanile peeks over the roofs of this run-down quarter of town, not unlike the polygonal Matitone office-block rising above the industrial port further west. A crumbly, bare Romanesque church with a Roman architrave surviving over its door, San Donato’s stark simplicity is refreshing after the self-importance of the nearby Gesù on Piazza Matteotti.
