Genoa

It was a dark and stormy night. It really was. So much so that this ancient city looked like a dreamscape. It was so out of this world, such a mix of modern and ancient, so steampunk in fact, that it reminded me of The City of Lost Children. There was grandeur coupled with decay everywhere. Keep in mind that Genoa probably reached its peak of opulence in the 1600s. So just the "decline" phase of this city, that is, not counting its nascent phase or the phase where it ran its own mini-empire as a city-state, is approximately 2.5 times as long as all of "American History." That alone should garner some respect. (As an aside, American intellectuals have been throwing around the word Empire in the last decade. There should be some unspoken rule about not using the word "Empire" unless you've had that empire for 500 years. Any idiotic nation can expand over a few dozen years. The real test is to have the kind of unifying cultural narrative, and the money flow, to keep that empire going for a few hundred years).

Here are pics from around the Old Port area in Genoa. If this city does not look like the set of the City of Lost Children, I don't know what does.

This boat was used in a movie about the pirate Blackbeard

There is a crescent and star on the flag. Not sure why Blackbeard would have used a crescent.
They're really paying homage to the actual pirates that the Genoese fought

If this isn't steampunk, I don't know what is.

There is a reconstructed Roman ship in the big bubble, but it is inexplicably not lit at night

Modern art, ancient walls

This is a real crane. Not a prop.

These windmill-like things spin and rotate in the wind

Just a street corner

There is a row of awesome buildings

In all this hoopla about the Doria family, I forgot to mention this other fellow from Genoa, who was turned down by the Genoese for being a crazy flake, who later discovered a continent. It turns out the Genoese were partly right: the guy had no idea what he was talking about and thought he hit India when in fact, he had only traveled half the distance there. But it's still kind of a big deal to discover a continent, so now they're trying to patch things up with him, I guess, so they put up his statue in a pretty central location.

What do you do when you kick your son out of your house,
and he comes back years later, having discovered a new continent?
You build a giant statue and pretend you loved him all along.

The next morning, when the weather was nice, I visited Andrea Doria's mansion in Genoa. It was too early for the place to be opened to the public, so all I've got is this picture of his garden.

Nice garden

Maybe if he did less gardening and more seafaring, Andrea Doria would lose fewer naval battles? I don't know. I do know that medieval naval battles are tricky business, with no clear winner. Two sides meet, shoot the hell out of each other, board each others' boats, free some galley slaves (i.e. typically, their own people who were taken prisoner in previous raids), take some people hostage to use as galley slaves themselves, and go their separate ways at night fall. Then they tell everyone back home that they won and receive a hero's welcome. Andrea Doria certainly did a lot of this, even though it's clear that he actually lost conclusively on two different occasions.