The history of Italy, of the Republic, of the several families, lives in the small squares now abandoned by road traffic in favour of the new thoroughfares; but the poetically minded may stop in them and lose themselves in reverie.
Architecture and the fine arts found in this town of shipbuilders and naval engineering their peculiar expression of gaiety, and a constructive style with a special tendency towards spacious courts, loggias, gardens and nymphei.
Medieval houses were given graceful loggias and embossed façades with black and white horizontal bandings and extremely tall, three shaft monumental Gothic ogee windows.
Frescoed façades and portals came into fashion at the time of the Rinascimento, so that Cattaneo and Piccolomini found the town gay with festive and coloured decorations for a population that passed its leisure among poets, music and lovemaking.
“If Venus were still alive wrote the future Pope Pius II, ” she would leave the woods of Cyprus and come and live in Genoa “.
How lively and enchanting the town must really have been can be realized from the pictures of the gardens of Palazzo Doria by Jan Massys; besides which, there are many frescoes still surviving and old prints of the famous villas of Genoa that confirm their beauty, and that of their fantastic and picturesque parks.
Alas! now so much of it has been ruthlessly destroyed by the expansion and modernization of the town and by industrial buildings.
At all times women contributed their charm of grace and beauty that impressed even Balzac, who was convinced that Michaelangelo mast have found in Genoa his models for the Medici tomb. Love for a Genoese belle drove Rambaldo de Vaqueiras to a frenzy; Louis XII of France also fell in love with a Genoese, while Il Poliziano and Lorenzo de’ Medici lamented for years the death of Simonetta whose delicate beauty Botticelli has immortalized in his ” Primavera “.
Anton Van Dyck has handed down to posterity the beauty of patrician ladies of the beginning of the XVII century, Ugo Foscolo sang Luisa Pallavicini, while the memory of Anna Schiaffino Giustiniani never faded from the heart of Cavour.
At the time of the Rinascimento, painters created for the Genoese a fantastical and imaginary kingdom that glorified on the ceilings of great halls the achievements of a family, pleasing adventures of the gods of Olympus, alternately exalting the virtues in episodes of Roman history with licentious tales out of Ovid’s Metamorphis. On the walls of rooms and halls, backgrounds of gardens or architectural perspectives were painted, that had the effect of abolishing any limit to distance and created that aspiration towards the infinite and space that sings in all our hearts.
Genoese painters were famous not only for their decorations of churches Old palaces. They painted also reredos and polyptychs; Francesco Oberti and Niccolò da Voltri under the influence of Tuscany and Emilia, whereas Mazone and Serfoglio felt that of the XV century Poppa and of painters from Pavia.
Brea, instead, felt that of Provence. Luca Cambiaso gave a personal impress to local painting that expanded North dominating the style of art existing there. The Flemish group composed of De Wad, Rubens and Van Dyck had a direct influence on Scorza, Travi, Vassallo and Castiglione, while Cambiaso founded the school that produced such painters as Tavarone, Fiasella, Bernardo and Valerio Castello, besides influencing to some extent the two Carlone. Among the various currents the independent personalities of Strozzi, Assereto, Gaulli and the great Magnasco stood out clearly.
Perin del Vaga with his neo-paganism guided the group of founders of the school of Genoese frescoists that Cambiaso perfected and that under Piola and De Ferrari reached its zenith, but declined at the end of the XVIII century when the Academy introduced austerity and died in the XIX, after Barabino, who was the last of a long list.
The local school of painting was animated by Foppa, Bonaccorsi, the Flemnings, Pracaccini, De Wael, Rubens and Van Dyck; just as sculpture, that till then had been dominated by the Lombard school, was freed of its restrictions and rigidity by Montorsoli, Leoni, Algardi, Giambologna, but above all by Bernini and Puget.
Having acquired its own expression during the century of the Piola it produced its own great masters, the brothers Schiaffino and Domenico Parodi.
In the XIX century the sculptors of Genoa found a proper outlet for their art in the new cemetery of Staglieno where many sepulchral monuments have been raised; S. Varni, Monteverde, De Albertis and Baroni are a few of the artists represented there.
We shall visit together this strange city that developed by degress around its first harbour with a tendency towards expansion to the West. Contemporarily a City and a State with a modern organization in which every palace seemed a royal residence, with its own art gallery, library and orchestra formed of celebrated musicians such as Antonio Lulli, Luigi Boccherini and Domenico Scarlatti, where famous composers such as Cimarosa, Handel and Christian Bach stayed.
We shall explore the heart of ancient Genoa and her various phases of expansion; we shall observe her from the roofs of sky- scrapers, from the surrounding hills, from the Sanctuaries where the French artists, who drew and painted her and reproduced her attractions in their romantic engravings, and the Italian artists who portrayed her, resided.
We shall reach the valleys of the Bisagno and the Polcevera that grow narrower and narrower as they mount up the barren mountain sides dotted with little villages that seem to belong to fairy tales, and finally descend into Piedmont after crossing the Turchino and the Langhe abounding in lordly castles.
We shall proceed along the picturesque Riviera di Levante with its succession of bays and jagged reefs, and visit the famous Cinque Terre so dear to Telemaco Signorini and Antonio Discovolo down to Portofino and Lerici in the Gulf of Poets (La Spezia).
We are going to stop in the little towns of Riviera di Ponente standing in small bays between jutting headlands, an enchanted land of palm trees and flowers up to the Balzi Rossi where prehistoric caves bear witness, in a grand primeval selling, to the life of paleolithic Man.
The days of ancient Rome will come to life again when we visit Savona, Finale and Ventimiglia where Piedmentese art descended to the coast, while in the district rendered famous by ” Doctor Antonio ” we shall find the Nice-Liguria school flourishing.
Amidst all those flowers in a scenery like fairyland, in the ancient churches ensconced in valleys, in the islands of Bergeggi and of Gallinaria we shall have visions of the landings of Saints and Hermits arriving from the sea.
Riviera di Levante gave birth to seamen and admirals, that of Ponente to men of law, of letters and poets, from the sweet songs of Chiabrera to the harmonious ones of Angelo Silvio Novaro.
We wish to mention here some of the writers who have described Genoa, that perhaps is the town of Italy most studied, as the many volumes of the Società della Storia Patria prove.
Portofino World, a world apart.
