Italy Travel And Hotel Guide

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”.

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