5 Days in Genoa

Genoa's living room is Piazza De Ferrari, a big open square with a bronze fountain from 1936 and the banks and insurance palaces that earned this district the nickname "the City". It's younger than it looks: the square took shape in the early 1900s, after a hill was dug away to make room for it.

On one side stands the Palazzo Ducale, seat of the doges after the first one, Simone Boccanegra, was elected in 1339. Today it's the city's cultural center, with big exhibitions you may or may not care for. The part to see anyway is the Torre Grimaldina and the cells beneath it, a prison whose inmates included the Ottoman corsair Dragut and the doge Paolo da Novi.

The Cathedral of San Lorenzo was consecrated in 1118 and took two more centuries to get its Gothic façade. The dome and the apse came in the 1500s, when the city hired the architect Galeazzo Alessi to rework the roof and the east end.

Inside, look for the shell. On 9 February 1941, a British battleship shelling the city fired a 381 mm armor-piercing round through the wall. It failed to explode, it's still there, and the Genoese carved a thank-you inscription next to it. Then go down to the Treasury Museum for the Sacro Catino, a green glass dish from the 9th or 10th century, brought home from the Crusades and long believed to be the Holy Grail. The Grail story is a legend, but the object is real.

Walk the few steps downhill from the cathedral and you're on Via San Lorenzo, home to two bakeries that do nothing but this: Focaccia e dintorni at number 21, open every day from 7:00, and Pan per focaccia at number 22. This is the Genoese morning in one bite. Genoese focaccia isn't the thick, bready kind you may know: it's thin, dimpled, oily and salty, and locals eat it warm for breakfast, dipped in a cappuccino.

It sounds wrong. Do it anyway. A slice and a coffee is a full breakfast here.

Trattoria da Maria on Vico Testadoro, a few minutes from the square, is the kind of place a Genoese would send you to: traditional regional cooking in a practical, crowded room, with no reservations. Go at opening time and order whatever is on the board.

If it's full, pick any trattoria with a short menu and locals eating.

Porta Soprana is a medieval gate in the city walls of 1155, and the small house beside it is where Christopher Columbus's family lived from about 1455 to 1470. He was born in 1451. The house you see is an 18th-century reconstruction: the original was probably destroyed in the French bombardment of 1684, and it lost its upper floors around 1900 when Via XX Settembre was cut through.

Go for the story, not the furniture: nobody can promise the walls are his. But standing in the lane where a boy grew up within sight of the harbor is a good way to understand why Genoa produced sailors.

Climb the hill to one of the oldest parts of the city. Santa Maria di Castello is a Romanesque church that was standing before the year 900, next to the Embriaci Tower, named for one of the families that made the city rich. Inside are 16th-century frescoes of the stories of David and painted majolica tiles, and behind the church there's a Dominican cloister with a small museum.

After dark the old town changes. The caruggi are lit by shop windows and bars, and the best way to see them is to wander toward Piazza delle Erbe, a small square five minutes from Palazzo Ducale. The bars here stay open until about 01:00 and fill with young people on Friday and Saturday nights.

For dinner, walk to Antica Osteria Ravecca on Via di Ravecca, open every day until about 23:00. Keep to the main alleys and zip your bag: pickpockets work the lively streets.

Via Garibaldi was laid out between 1558 and 1583 as Strada Nuova, the "new street", when the Genoese aristocracy expanded the city north onto the hill. It's only 250 meters long and 7.5 wide, and the families who built it were the bankers who financed the Spanish Crown's wars. They competed in palaces, with stepped courtyards, grand staircases and gardens climbing the slope.

The street and the system of the Rolli are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Rolli means "lists": when a foreign dignitary came to town, the Republic lodged him in one of the private palaces that owners had put on its public lists, which turned hosting into a competition for prestige. Forty-two palaces are in the UNESCO site. Many are offices, public buildings and private homes today, and only a few, such as the Strada Nuova museums, can be visited on any ordinary day.

Palazzo Rosso was built in 1675 for the Brignole Sale family, and the last of them, the Duchess of Galliera, left it to the city in 1874 with everything in it. That's why it still feels like a home: ceiling frescoes, period rooms and a gallery of Baroque art. Anthony van Dyck painted the family in Genoa, so there are portraits of Brignole Sale ancestors, one on horseback, and there's a Dürer, the Portrait of a Young Venetian, from 1506, plus works by Veronese, Guercino and Guido Reni.

It reopened in June 2022 after three years of restoration, and it's the best of the three if you only have time for one.

Across the street, Palazzo Bianco is the older of the pair, built between 1530 and 1540 for Luca Grimaldi. The Duchess of Galliera's will of 1884 turned it into a public gallery. It's good on Genoese, Flemish and Spanish painting, and quieter than Rosso.

Palazzo Doria-Tursi, a few steps away, is the biggest palace on the street, begun in 1565 for Niccolò Grimaldi, the main banker of Philip II of Spain. Its façade alternates pink Finale stone, gray slate and white Carrara marble. It has been Genoa's city hall since 1848. The prize is the violin of Niccolò Paganini, a Genoese: his Guarneri del Gesù, nicknamed Il Cannone, "the cannon", is kept here along with his other instruments.

A five-minute walk toward the old center is Piazza Soziglia, small and busy, with two shops older than Italy. Klainguti, a café and pastry shop, has been here since 1828. Romanengo has been making candied fruit and flowers since 1780, and its window looks like a jewelry store.

Have your coffee standing at the counter, like the Genoese, and take home a box of candied clementines or pears dipped in dark chocolate.

Via Balbi is the second of the Strade Nuove, built between 1602 and 1620, a longer and straighter cousin of Via Garibaldi. At number 10 is the Palazzo Reale, the Royal Palace, begun for the Balbi family in 1618, sold to the Durazzo and then, in 1823, to the House of Savoy. Much of its original furniture and its frescoes by Baroque painters are still there.

Today it's a state museum with its own ticket, not covered by the Strada Nuova one. If you have the energy, take the Montegalletto lift near Via Balbi, a 1929 lift rebuilt in 2004 that runs sideways through the hill and then up, and comes out by Castello d'Albertis, a Gothic Revival castle with a view of the port.

From Piazza Portello, a two-minute walk from Via Garibaldi, a glass-fronted Liberty-style lift rises 57 meters to the Castelletto terrace. Opened in 1909, it was the first public lift in Genoa. Up top, a fortress stood here until the people razed it in the uprising of 1849, and what's left is a balcony over the slate roofs, the port and the Lanterna.

Once the clocks go back on 25 October, sunset falls a little after 17:00 and slips toward 16:45 by December, so be up there half an hour early. When the light goes, ride the lift back down to Piazza Portello.

For dinner, walk back to the old town and order the dish Genoa is famous for. Trattoria Rosmarino is on Salita del Fondaco, and it's open for dinner every night. Ask for trofie or trenette al pesto: the short twisted pasta or the long ribbons with basil, pine nuts, garlic, olive oil and cheese, pounded the traditional way in a marble mortar.

Real pesto isn't paste from a jar: it's a fragrant sauce that never meets heat, and you taste the basil first.

Take a regional train from Principe, about 40 minutes at the faster times, to Camogli, a fishing town of tall, painted houses lined up along the beach. The colors weren't only for decoration: they helped the fishermen find their own house from the sea. A folk story says the name comes from casa delle mogli, "house of the wives", because captains' wives stayed here while the men sailed. In its day the town had hundreds of tall ships and was called the city of a thousand white sails, and a naval college named after Columbus has stood here since 1874.

Walk down to the harbor, along the sea wall and out to the end of the mole, then grab a coffee and a slice of focaccia in one of the cafés while you wait for the boat.

San Fruttuoso has no road. It's reachable only on foot or by sea, which is why it has stayed so small, and the boat is the whole point. The Blue Line of Golfo Paradiso runs from Camogli to Punta Chiappa, a landmark outcrop of pudding-stone, and on to San Fruttuoso, with a good chance of seeing dolphins on the way.

In October 2026 the boats leave Camogli on the hour from 9:00 to 12:00 and from 14:00 to 16:00, with an extra at 13:00 on Saturdays and holidays. Boats back leave San Fruttuoso at 9:30, 10:30, 11:30 and 12:30, then at 15:00, 16:00 and 17:00 (plus 14:00 on Saturdays and holidays). Summer timetables are longer. The Golfo Paradiso site has the current one.

The abbey sits on a tiny beach under a 16th-century Doria watchtower. A church was founded here in the 8th century and rebuilt as a Benedictine monastery in the 10th, and later the Doria family, powerful in Genoa, moved their burial vaults into it: you can still see their 14th-century tombs in white marble and gray stone. In 1551 the pope put the abbey under the patronage of the admiral Andrea Doria, and his heirs built the tower in 1562. The FAI, Italy's national trust, received it as a gift in 1983.

Underwater in the bay, 17 meters down, stands the bronze Cristo degli Abissi, a 2.5-meter statue of Christ with raised hands, placed in August 1954 near the spot where a pioneer of Italian scuba diving had died in 1947. At that depth it's a diver's sight, so from the shore you get the abbey, the beach and the pines behind it, which is reward enough.

On the way back, get off the train at Recco, one stop from Camogli toward Genoa. This is where focaccia col formaggio comes from: two layers of paper-thin dough with fresh prescinsêua cheese in the middle, baked until the cheese oozes. The authentic version has had EU protected status (IGP) since January 2015, and it's a different thing from the other cheese focaccias you'll see around Liguria.

Recco was heavily bombed in 1943 and rebuilt in the 1940s and 50s, so don't expect old streets. Expect food. Manuelina, open here since 1885, is the best-known restaurant for it, and a bakery or focacceria in town is a cheaper way to taste it.

The Aquarium was designed by Renzo Piano for the 1992 Columbus Expo, when the old port was reinvented, and it looks a bit like a ship at its berth. It's the largest in Italy and one of the biggest in Europe, with tanks from tropical reefs to the Mediterranean and a pavilion where you can watch dolphins from above and below.

Go early on a weekday for fewer school groups.

Lunch is a paper cone on Via Sottoripa, the arcaded street along the old port. Genoa's mixed fried fish, fritto misto, is sold from friggitorie here in rolls of paper, still sizzling. Antica Friggitoria Carega, at number 113, is a long-running stop.

It's cheap, fast and messy. Eat it standing in the arcade with a glass of white wine.

The Lanterna is Genoa's symbol, a 76-meter stone tower on a rock at the western end of the port, rebuilt in its present form in 1543. It's the fourth oldest lighthouse in the world and the tallest in the Mediterranean, and measured together with the rock it stands on, it reaches about 112 meters. The first tower here dates from around 1128.

Take the metro to Dinegro and walk about ten minutes. The visit includes a park and a museum at the base, and a climb to the first terrace.

The Galata Maritime Museum, on the old dock beside the port, is one of the best maritime museums in the Mediterranean and tells Genoa's six centuries as a sea power with 4,300 original objects. There's a full-size reproduction of a Genoese galley, a 19th-century brigantine, the deckhouse of an early 20th-century steamship, a room on Columbus with a portrait attributed to Ghirlandaio, and a section on Italian emigration to America.

Moored alongside is the submarine Nazario Sauro, a Cold War boat built in 1976 and open to visitors, with sonar and engine sounds. Don't skip the two panoramic terraces.

Back at the Porto Antico, the Bigo is Renzo Piano's other gift to the harbor, opened on 15 May 1992. Its name and shape come from the bighi, the ship-loading cranes, and it carries a rotating panoramic lift with a 360-degree view. A restoration of the steel structure that began in 2025 was reported finished in May 2026.

The Neptune galleon, a replica of a 17th-century Spanish ship, is moored nearby.

For dinner, go to a friggitoria for farinata, a thin, golden pancake of chickpea flour, water and olive oil, baked in a wood-fired oven and cut into triangles. Antica Sciamadda in the old town, on Via San Giorgio and Via di Ravecca, is a good one.

Eat it hot with black pepper and no toppings.

The Zecca-Righi funicular leaves from Largo della Zecca at the edge of the old town and climbs about 280 meters in seven stops. Built between 1895 and 1897, it starts in a tunnel, then comes out in the open between buildings, with the city dropping away below.

The best view is from the top at Righi, where the port and the slate roofs of the old town lie below you, and the sea fills the horizon.

From the top station, a walk uphill leads to Peralto Park, the gateway to the walls and forts that ring the hills. Genoa has more and longer city walls than any other Italian city, and Forte Sperone, on top of Monte Peralto, is the most dominant of the 17th-century fortifications. It's shaped like the bow of a ship, which is how it got its name.

You don't need to go all the way. Even a short stretch gets you quiet woods, old walls and views over both valleys. Wear shoes with grip and bring water.

Back down the hill, the Mercato Orientale on Via XX Settembre is a lively covered market for produce and baked goods, with a restaurant in the middle. Orientale just means eastern.

Walk the stalls first, then sit down for lunch or buy focaccia and fruit to eat outside.

The Corso Italia is the city's seafront promenade, about 2 kilometers of sea air, runners, rollerbladers and families, ending at Boccadasse. It's best on a sunny day, when half of Genoa seems to be out on it.

It isn't pretty everywhere (a main road runs alongside), but the sea is close. Walk it east, with the sun behind you.

Boccadasse is an old mariners' village that the city grew around and never swallowed: colored houses around a small cobbled beach, and a few fishermen who still work. Reach it by the stairs or by Via Aurora, a crêuza, the narrow Ligurian lane that runs down to the sea. The singer Gino Paoli lived here for years, and his song La gatta recalls that time without naming the place.

Look up at Türcke Castle, a medieval-style castle built in 1903, on the cape above. For the classic view of the village with the Portofino promontory behind it, stand on Piazza Edoardo Firpo, by the church above the bay.

Around the bay are ice cream shops, bakeries and restaurants. Start with a gelato: Antica Gelateria Amedeo is one of the shops on the bay.

For dinner, pick a trattoria with a view of the water and order whatever fish is on the board. It isn't the cheapest way to eat, but it's the right end to five days.