Genoa

• 1. Introduction

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  Genoa sits wedged between the Ligurian Sea and the Apennine Mountains, a city that Petrarch once called la Superba, "the superb one," for its glories on the water and its astonishing buildings rising from the shore. For more than seven centuries, from the 11th century to 1797, it was the capital of one of the most powerful maritime republics the world had ever seen. Its merchants controlled trade routes from Egypt to Crimea. Its bankers quietly financed the Spanish Empire for decades. Its citizens gave the world Christopher Columbus, Niccolò Paganini, and Giuseppe Mazzini. Today, more than 1.5 million people live in the wider metropolitan area stretching along the Italian Riviera, and the port remains the busiest in Italy and in the entire Mediterranean Sea. Yet Genoa is not simply a city resting on old glory. The same harbour that launched medieval galleys now handles cargo volumes measured in millions of tonnes. The same narrow alleys, called caruggi, that Marco Polo walked before writing his famous Travels, still thread through one of the largest medieval centres in Europe. How did a city pressed between mountains and sea build an empire of commerce? How did it endure plagues, bombardments, and the collapse of its republic, and still find ways to reinvent itself? Those are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. The Name and Its Origins

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  Pliny the Elder recorded the name oppidum Genua as part of the Augustan administrative district known as Regio IX Liguria. But where the name itself came from is a matter of genuine debate, and each proposed origin reveals something about how the city has been understood across the centuries. One theory traces it to the Latin word genua, meaning "knees," on the idea that the city occupies what geographers imagined as the knee of the Italian boot. A second explanation looks to Janus, the Roman deity with two faces, one turned forward and one turned back, whose name gave rise to the Latin word ianua, meaning door or passage. That reading made the city a kind of gateway between the sea to the south and the mountains to the north. A third proposal ties the name to Genoa's position at the centre of the Ligurian coastal arch, a purely geographical reading that sidesteps mythology entirely. The most archaeologically grounded theory comes from an Etruscan pottery-sherd inscription bearing the word Kainua, which meant "New City" in the Etruscan language. Under that reading, the Romans adopted and gradually altered the older name, unknowingly erasing its original meaning in the process. None of these proposals has been definitively settled, and that unresolved debate suits a city whose identity has always been shaped by its position between worlds, balancing the inland peninsula against the open sea.

• 3. From Oppidum to Empire

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  The area around Genoa has been continuously inhabited since the fifth or fourth millennium BC, placing it among the oldest settled locations in Italy. The first recognisable town was founded, probably by the ancient Ligures, on the hill now called Castello inside the medieval old town, some time in the fifth century BC. Even at that early stage, the settlement was already called "the emporium of the Ligurians" for its commercial drive. When the Carthaginians destroyed the town in 209 BC during the Second Punic War, Rome rebuilt it. After the Carthaginian Wars ended in 146 BC, the rebuilt town received municipal rights and began the slow expansion toward the San Lorenzo promontory. Trade at that period ran in skins, timber, and honey, with goods moving between the coast and inland cities such as Tortona and Piacenza. Centuries later, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Ostrogoths occupied Genoa, then the Byzantines made it the seat of their vicar, then the Lombard invasion of 568 drove Bishop Honoratus of Milan to take refuge there. By 934-35, the town was sacked and burned by a Fatimid fleet under Ya'qub ibn Ishaq al-Tamimi, a reminder that a harbour invites attack as readily as it invites trade. The real transformation began with the First Crusade. Genoa at that time had a population of roughly 10,000 people. Twelve galleys, one ship, and 1,200 soldiers set sail in July 1097. Genoese crossbowmen led by Guglielmo Embriaco played a significant role at the siege of Jerusalem in 1099. From those campaigns, the Republic secured favourable trading rights across the eastern Mediterranean, establishing a commercial reach that would define the city for the next several centuries. The Bank of Saint George, founded in 1407, became the oldest known state deposit bank in the world, and Columbus later donated one-tenth of his income from the discovery of the Americas to it for the relief of taxation on goods.

• 4. The Age of the Genoese

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  The historian Fernand Braudel called the years 1557 to 1627 "the age of the Genoese," describing it as a rule "so discreet and sophisticated that historians for a long time failed to notice it." That phrase, drawn from his 1984 work, captures something essential about how Genoese power operated. It was financial, not military. Genoese bankers sat in counting houses in Seville and extended fluid credit to the Habsburg system, converting the unpredictable flow of American silver arriving from Spain's Atlantic ports into dependable capital for further ventures. But the role of Genoese merchants in the Spanish Atlantic extended beyond money. Scholars note that Genoese merchants and entrepreneurs settled across the empire and built networks that persisted well into the 19th century. This influence was preceded by centuries of rivalry in the eastern Mediterranean. In March 1261, the Republic of Genoa signed a treaty with Michael VIII Palaiologos, emperor of Nicaea, who aimed to recapture Constantinople. When his troops retook the city on the 25th of July 1261, Genoa was rewarded with free trade rights throughout the restored empire. The islands of Chios and Lesbos became Genoese commercial stations. Genoa also established colonies in Crimea, the most significant of which was Caffa. The loss of Chios to the Ottoman Empire in 1566 struck a severe blow, because Genoa's trading position had always depended on control of Mediterranean sea lanes. The Republic's slow decline accelerated in the 17th century. A French-Savoian army briefly besieged the city in May 1625. The French bombarded it again in May 1684 in retaliation for its support of Spain. Between those two attacks, a plague killed as many as half of Genoa's inhabitants in 1656-57.

• 5. Invention and Unlikely Firsts

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  Around the 14th century, the source of one of the world's most enduring garments can be traced to Genoa's navy. Genoese sailors needed a fabric that could be worn wet or dry. The navy equipped them with a fustian textile of what was described as "medium quality and of reasonable cost," similar to cotton corduroy, used for work clothes generally. That fabric, named for its city of origin, became what the world now calls blue jeans. In the prisons of Palazzo San Giorgio, another unlikely creation took shape. Marco Polo, held captive there, collaborated with the writer Rustichello da Pisa to compose The Travels of Marco Polo, a text that shaped European understanding of Asia for centuries. In 1780, the Confetteria Romanengo was founded in Genoa, a confectionery whose existence hints at the city's tradition of refined domestic culture alongside its mercantile ambition. The Genoese historian Germano Celant coined the term Arte Povera in 1967, naming an entire movement in contemporary art. Simonetta Vespucci, described in the source as considered the most beautiful woman of her time, was born in Genoa and later became the subject of Sandro Botticelli's paintings, including The Birth of Venus and Primavera. The humanist Leon Battista Alberti, architect, poet, and philosopher, was born in Genoa on the 14th of February 1404. The city also gave birth to Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Riccardo Giacconi and astronaut Franco Malerba, extending its record of notable firsts into the scientific era. In 1902, Luigi Carnera discovered an asteroid and named it 485 Genua, after the city's Latin name.

• 6. The Palaces and the Flag

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  Via Garibaldi, the street once known as Strada Nuova or Via Aurea, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2006 as part of the site called Genoa: Le Strade Nuove and the system of the Palazzi dei Rolli. The project it commemorates was among the most ambitious urban planning exercises of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The ruling aristocracy financed new thoroughfares and built a series of palaces that were then enrolled in official registers called the Rolli. When foreign dignitaries visited, the state selected a palace from those lists to serve as lodging, with the grandeur of the palace matched to the guest's rank. The Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens compiled a book of drawings of these palaces in 1622, titled Palazzi di Genova, presenting them as a model for European nobility. Of the many palaces built in the city centre, 114 have not been substantially altered. Among them, 42 Palazzi dei Rolli are inscribed on the World Heritage List. Three on Via Garibaldi now form the Musei di Strada Nuova. Palazzo Doria-Tursi, the grandest of the three, holds the official weights and measures of the old Republic alongside the violin known as Il Cannone, which belonged to Niccolò Paganini. The flag of the city also carries a long history. Genoa has displayed a red cross on a white field at least since 1218, with the earliest documented use of the inscription marking its identity as the "cross ensign of the commune of Genoa." The flag now known as the St. George's Cross appears to have replaced the older saint's flag as Genoa's primary symbol sometime during the 14th century. A tradition, which cannot be substantiated as historical, holds that England's flag derives ultimately from the Genoese flag by way of the Third Crusade.

• 7. Collapse, Rebuilding, and the Morandi Bridge

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  The Ligurian Republic was born on the 14th of June 1797, when Napoleon's direct invasion ended seven centuries of the old Republic's existence and overthrew the elites who had governed it throughout its entire history. The republic did not last. In 1805 it was annexed by France, becoming three French departments. After Napoleon's fall, Genoa briefly regained independence under the name Repubblica genovese before the Congress of Vienna transferred its territories to the Kingdom of Sardinia under the House of Savoy, overriding the principle of restoring legitimate governments. Through the 19th century the city rebuilt around industry. In 1853 Giovanni Ansaldo founded the shipyards that would produce many passenger ships. In 1884 Rinaldo Piaggio founded Piaggio and Company, which began making locomotives and railway carriages before turning to aircraft production in 1923. The railway connected Genoa fully to France and the rest of Italy in 1874 via three lines: Genoa-Turin, Genoa-Ventimiglia, and Genoa-Pisa. In 1935 to 1940 the Torre Piacentini was built, one of the first skyscrapers in Europe, and the tallest habitable building in Italy until 1954. On the 14th of August 2018, the Ponte Morandi, a motorway viaduct built in 1967, collapsed during a torrential downpour, killing 43 people. Its remains were demolished in August 2019. The replacement, called the Genoa-Saint George Bridge, was designed by Renzo Piano and inaugurated in August 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. The speed of that reconstruction, made possible by a redefinition of public procurement rules, produced what is now called the Genoa model, a framework being applied to other large projects in the city, including the Levante Waterfront, whose design Piano donated to the municipality in 2017.