1/23/2024 0 Comments Serious sam secret![]() ![]() Private citizens are also investing in projects to raise the global profile. Carlo Clavarino in the Great Room at Palazzo Spinola © Stefan Giftthaler Bucci, who was previously CEO of the Eastman Kodak Company, has brought a businessman’s drive to his ambitious legacy plans: thanks to his unwavering support for a high-speed train connection between Milan and Genoa, the Ferrovie dello Stato (the state railway company) will launch one of as little as 50 minutes in 2026, which will likely have positive implications not just for tourism but for the city’s demographics too. ![]() That said, the city appears to be in the midst of an unofficial rebrand. ![]() The main showroom at Via Garibaldi 12 © Stefan Giftthaler Unlike Florence, where the patrimony is almost hyper-managed, or Rome, where the wow moments come stupefyingly thick and fast, Genoa requires that you dig a bit for your dazzle. Bagnara tells me that in this same palazzo, one storey up, was once a ballroom whose ceiling was covered entirely in lapis lazuli (sadly destroyed by bombing in the second world war): “Maybe it’s arrogant to say it, but the first time I saw Versailles… I wasn’t so amazed.” The lobby and lounge of Palazzo Durazzo, with artwork by Sam Falls © Stefan GiftthalerĪt the same time, he says, “Genoese are constantly discovering our own city.” There are carrugi he himself only recently happened upon for the first time, the surprise and gritty contrast always exhilarating. ![]() Its ceilings are frescoed ornately, its walls and door frames are gilded or painted delicate pistachio, its monochrome marble floors gleam – all a backdrop for an authoritative edit of furniture, tableware, books, fine art, exquisite kitchen toys and more. You’ll probably only find it if you’re very curious or you know where to look.” Located up a flight of stairs at the back of the foyer of one of the Palazzi dei Rolli, it spreads across hundreds of square metres of the piano nobile. “This store mirrors Genoa a bit that way. Splendour reigns on the ruler-straight Via Garibaldi, home to many of the Palazzi dei Rolli – the 16th/17th-century palaces built by the republic’s noble class, showplaces in which to receive, impress and do the big deals with dignitaries from across the then-known world.ġ7th-century frescoes on a palazzo façade in the city’s historic centre © Stefan Giftthalerīut “it’s a city that hides behind façades”, says Lorenzo Bagnara, owner of the design emporium Via Garibaldi 12. Wedged into a narrow coastal plain between the Mediterranean and the Ligurian Apennines, Genoa, like all good ports, is a dense layer cake of cultures, languages and influences. But Genoa is an incredible lens on Italian culture, a unique window.” “They wanted it to be an industrial city. “Thirty years ago, no one had a vision for this city to be a destination,” Bucci continues. Cavo Pasticceria in Genoa’s Piazza Fossatello © Stefan Giftthalerīut while it still enjoys outsized maritime-commercial clout and has orchestrated a few moments in the modern spotlight (Expo 1992, European Capital of Culture 2004), Genoa seems not to register meaningfully on the radar of globetrotters. It harbours a patrimony of which the archive is only a small piece there are churches to rival Naples’s alongside aristocratic palaces that compare, in magnificence and number, to those of Rome. Genoa – population just under 815,000, Italy’s largest (or second-largest, depending on your metrics) commercial port and the capital of the region of Liguria – has a history replete with military dominion, economic primacy and staggering wealth. It’s among the most significant state archives in Europe “and most people have no idea it exists”, says Marco Bucci, the city’s mayor. Impressive enough on their own, but before I left I was shown other rooms, in which thousands more such documents were carefully shelved and cord-bound lined head to toe, I was told, they would stretch about 40km. There were treatises in Latin and Majorcan Arabic, and an enormous Ottoman-era decree, crowned with the gleaming gold calligraphic tughra of the sultan another bore the signature of a 12th-century pope. In an echoey refectory hall, a dozen or so pages of parchment and vellum were arrayed across wooden tables. The first thing in Genoa by which I was completely dazzled – but far from the last – was hidden away inside the 17th-century monastery complex of Sant’Ignazio. Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. ![]()
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