The Aquarium of Genoa is the largest aquarium in Italy: more than 1.2 million visitors a year come to the Porto Antico to see sharks, dolphins, penguins and manatees in tanks that recreate the seas and fresh waters of the world.
Renzo...
Via Garibaldi is Genoa's street of noble palaces: 250 metres in a straight line, rising gently, lined with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century mansions, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site together with the Palazzi dei Rolli. Three of these palaces...
The Galleria di Palazzo Rosso is the Baroque home of the Brignole-Sale family on Via Garibaldi in Genoa, preserved with its frescoed rooms, furniture and family picture collection: portraits by van Dyck, and canvases by Guercino, Reni, Veronese...
San Lorenzo Cathedral is Genoa's cathedral, in the heart of the old town: a Gothic façade in bands of black and white, two lions on the steps, and inside treasures that range from the ashes of the patron saint to a bowl once believed to be the...
The Galleria di Palazzo Bianco is the great picture gallery of Via Garibaldi in Genoa: in a palace with a pale eighteenth-century façade, paintings by Caravaggio, Rubens, van Dyck, Memling, Veronese and Zurbarán hang beside the masters of Genoese...
Porta Soprana is Genoa's medieval gate: two tall crenellated towers flanking a great arch, at the top of the Sant'Andrea hill. It was the city's eastern entrance and today marks the passage between the old town and modern Genoa.
It was...
The Palazzo Ducale is the palace of the Doges of Genoa, between Piazza De Ferrari and Piazza Matteotti: for centuries the seat of the Republic's government, today it is the city's cultural centre, with major exhibitions in frescoed halls, arcaded...
The Columbus House is the small house, a stone's throw from Porta Soprana, where Christopher Columbus lived as a boy with his family. The one you visit is an eighteenth-century reconstruction, but it stands on the exact site of the Colombo family...
The Museum of Sant'Agostino is Genoa's museum of sculpture, in Piazza Sarzano, inside a thirteenth-century convent: statues, capitals, frescoes and tombs rescued from the city's churches and palaces that vanished over time, from the tenth to the...
The Church of San Matteo is the Doria family church, in Genoa's old town: a Gothic façade in black and white stripes on a small square enclosed by the family's palaces, perhaps the best-preserved corner of medieval Genoa.
It was founded in...
The Lanterna is the lighthouse of the port of Genoa and the symbol of the city: a 77-metre stone tower on a rock, 117 metres above the sea counting the rock. It is the tallest lighthouse in the Mediterranean and one of the oldest in the world...
Piazza De Ferrari is Genoa's main square, between the old town and the modern city: a large bronze fountain in the middle, the Teatro Carlo Felice, the painted side of the Palazzo Ducale and the monumental buildings of the early twentieth...
The Galleria Nazionale di Palazzo Spinola is a noble palace in Genoa that has stayed just as it was when people lived in it: frescoes, furniture, mirrors and paintings in their places, in the heart of the alleys, in Piazza di Pellicceria, plus a...
The Galleria Nazionale di Palazzo Reale is the museum inside the Savoy royal palace on Via Balbi in Genoa: intact Baroque rooms, more than two hundred paintings, a sumptuous hall of mirrors and a hanging garden overlooking the old...
The Galata Museo del Mare is Genoa's great maritime museum, in the Darsena of the old port: a full-size Genoese galley, a brigantine, a storm off Cape Horn to face at the helm and a real submarine moored in front of the museum.
It is the...
Palazzo San Giorgio is the painted palace on Genoa's old port, in Piazza Caricamento: half medieval, in red brick and stone, half sixteenth-century, with its seaward façade covered in frescoes and a huge Saint George slaying the...
The Bigo is Renzo Piano's white crane towering over Genoa's Porto Antico: a cluster of steel masts fanned out over the water, with a panoramic lift that rises and turns above the harbour and the old town.
Its name and shape come from the...
The Church of the Gesù, dedicated to Saints Ambrose and Andrew, is the Baroque jewel box of Piazza Matteotti, a stone's throw from Piazza De Ferrari and opposite the Palazzo Ducale. Its lavish, many-coloured interior holds frescoes, marble and...
The Villa del Principe is the private palace of Andrea Doria, the admiral who in the 16th century ruled Genoa in all but name without ever taking the title. It stands in Fassolo, just outside the old walls towards the Lanterna, and keeps frescoed...
The Church of San Donato is the finest example of Genoese Romanesque: a 12th-century stone church in the heart of the old town, in the Molo district, with an octagonal bell tower rising above the alleys towards Stradone Sant'Agostino.
The...
The Church of San Pietro in Banchi is the church raised above the shops of Piazza Banchi, the old square of bankers and merchants in Genoa's historic centre: you climb up to it by a grand staircase, above a row of shops that paid for its...
Boccadasse is Genoa's old fishing village: pastel-coloured houses huddled around a small bay, boats pulled up on the shore and a little church by the sea, at the end of the Corso Italia seafront, about 5 kilometres from the centre.
The...
The Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno is Genoa's great burial ground, in the Val Bisagno: one of the most important monumental cemeteries in Europe, an open-air museum of marble statues, arcades and chapels climbing the hillside among the...
The Gallery of Modern Art of Genoa, the GAM, is the museum of 19th- and 20th-century Italian art tucked away in the Parks of Nervi, in the historic Villa Saluzzo Serra: paintings and sculptures inside a noble residence, with an English-style park...
Villa Durazzo Pallavicini is a large 19th-century romantic park on the hill of Pegli, in Genoa's western suburbs: almost nine hectares of paths, ponds, grottoes and fake ruins, laid out like a play in three acts. The entrance is next to Pegli...
The Spianata di Castelletto is Genoa's most famous panoramic terrace: the Luigi Montaldo viewpoint, about 80 metres above the sea, looks out right over the old town, with its roofs, bell towers and harbour spread out below you.
The view is...
The Castello d'Albertis, home of the Museum of World Cultures, is the Gothic Revival castle that sea captain Enrico Alberto d'Albertis had built for himself on the hill of Montegalletto, above Principe station: towers and battlements looming over...
The Raccolte Frugone is a small museum of Italian and foreign art from the 19th and early 20th centuries, in the Parks of Nervi, in Genoa: paintings, sculptures and drawings by many of the great names of the period, in a villa surrounded by the...
The Passeggiata Anita Garibaldi, to the Genoese simply the Nervi promenade, is a pedestrian seafront walk of almost two kilometres along the cliffs, from Nervi's little harbour to the old landing place of Capolungo, with the Portofino promontory...
The Palazzo Reale of Genoa is the most sumptuous of the palaces on Via Balbi: a Baroque royal palace that has kept its interiors intact, with frescoes, stuccoes, mirrors, furniture and furnishings from three centuries. It is one of the Palazzi...
The Basilica della Santissima Annunziata del Vastato, the "Nunziata" to the Genoese, is one of the most sumptuous churches in Genoa: behind a neoclassical facade with six Ionic columns, a stone's throw from Via Balbi, it hides the greatest...
The Villa Croce Museum of Contemporary Art is Genoa's museum of 20th-century and present-day art: a neoclassical villa set in a park on the Carignano hill, which the Croce family donated to the city in 1951 so that it would become a...
The Nervi Parks are nine hectares of lawns, avenues and exotic trees between the Via Aurelia and the sea, at the far eastern end of Genoa: the gardens of four old private villas, now a single public park with four museums.
More than a...
The Edoardo Chiossone Museum of Oriental Art holds one of the most important collections of Asian art in Europe: some fifteen thousand Japanese and Chinese pieces, in a modern building inside the Villetta Di Negro park, right in the center of...
Piazza San Matteo is the little square of the Doria family in the heart of Genoa's old town: a Gothic church and the family's palaces, striped in white marble and black stone, gathered around a raised churchyard. Its look has changed little since...
The Commenda di San Giovanni di Prè is a Romanesque complex on Via Prè, near the port of Genoa: in 1180 the Knights Hospitaller of St. John founded it as a hospice for pilgrims bound for the Holy Land. Today it houses the National Museum of...
The Giannettino Luxoro Museum is a house museum in the Nervi Parks, at the far eastern end of Genoa: a 1903 villa overlooking the rocky shore, furnished like a collector's home, with paintings, clocks, ceramics and nativity figurines.
The...
The Wolfsoniana is the museum of Italian decorative arts and propaganda from 1880 to 1945, in the Nervi Parks, at the far eastern end of Genoa: furniture, glass, ceramics, posters and paintings, from Art Nouveau to Art Deco to...
Corso Italia is Genoa's seafront promenade: more than two kilometers of sidewalk overlooking the sea, from the Foce to the village of Boccadasse, lined with beach clubs, restaurants, swimming pools and bars. It's the Genoese's favorite stroll,...
The Magazzini del Cotone are the long complex of buildings on the Molo Vecchio, in Genoa's Porto Antico: built between the late 19th and early 20th centuries for the port's goods, they now house a multiplex movie theater, the convention center,...