Postcards from Genoa

The history of Genoa it's a broad one: between ages, different latitudes and longitudes.

From the green and harsh mountains of the Apennines, suddenly it comes the lived spaced that shortly descends towards the sea, where it doesn't finish, but where others genovese over-seas's stories start...

Commercial routes, noble's power influences and political balances, stories of sea, bring the genoan red crossed shield to Corsica, Sardinia, Greece, Aegean sea, Minor Asia; then, passed the fortified outpost Galata Tower in the pre-ottoman Constantinople, it arrives until the Black Sea, in Crimea; after, returning backwards, from the North Africa and beyond Hercules' Columns, until the end (or the begin?) of that big story started in 1492...

This colonial richness has Genoa as motherland, amorphous and heterogeneous as every contemporary town nowadays but stretched and narrowed towards the coast, as every place of sea can be. Heterogeneous as heterogeneous its growth had been: there is a maritime part that connects the 1538 Lanterna to the 1992 Fair, and that continues for all the riviera. To its shoulder, there's the people's town, with its poetry and its Daedalus of narrow medieval streets, of the same age of the dark and bichromatic churches with a façade onto small squares. Opposed to it, there's the town of the nobles and of the Lords, of the Doria's Prince Villa that tastes of Rome and it's close to the XVIII sabauda part that recalls Turin in the memory. It is possible to see, apparently unreachable, the modern suburbs on the mountains, dominated by the “snake” of the '60 public social housing program. As punctual diffused intermission, some architectures soaring into the sky, recognizable landmarks both from the sea and from the land, pieces of confidence in the future built.

Many trades, many colonies, many history has the port as engine that, as effect on the urban perception's quality, bring an important infrastructural weight to load. But connecting goods and passengers to far lands isn't the only determining factor of the recent Genoa's history; in a relatively short span of time, the last century, the population growth quickly than it happened in the other centuries: the necessity to have efficient interior transportation system became a main one. And “la soprelevata”, the 4 lane road based on concrete piers completed in 1972 after numerous demolitions of entire sections of the maritime city, is the most onerous symbol because of the breaking of the intimate link between the port and town.

Maybe to break the visual historical and urban continuity in Genoa through its greatest strength, the traffic, is the latest sign of the transformation that has come out slowly…and seems the moment when one of the most prosperous and stable republics of the Mediterranean, that was already metropolitan, transformed itself in a contemporary town.