In Genoa, getting lost is the key to discovering the city—this year's European Capital of Culture. James Traub says it also helps that Genoa sits on a radiant coastline

The architect Renzo Piano has described the Piazza San Matteo, a square in the historic center of Genoa where he has built an office, as the emblem of this "secret, inward-looking casbah city." San Matteo is not really a piazza at all—not, that is, a broad public space created by the convergence of perpendicular streets. It was a private compound, a walled shelter established nine hundred years ago by one of the city's dynastic families and only later incorporated into the municipal street plan. The great palaces of the Doria family and the Church of San Matteo, all built of banded black-and-white stone, turn their backs to the larger city, the better to foster conspiracies and plots, which in fact is just what the Dorias did there for half a millennium. For a seafaring people of merchants and admirals, the Genovese were remarkably self-absorbed. Apparently, they still are. As my friend Carla, born in Venice but long a resident of Genoa, says, "The Venetians have always welcomed people from the outside; the Genovese do not. They are a very strange people."

Genoa is itself a kind of secret. How many of us have even heard of the Dorias, the Fieschi, the Spinolas, the Grimaldis, and the other families who forged the city's greatness? How many people know that Genoa's centro storico is the largest preserved medieval city center in Europe, and perhaps the densest and most labyrinthine—a casbah, as Piano says? But the Genovese seem to like it that way: There may be no other city with so much to offer that is so majestically indifferent to marketing itself. And this self-possession is the source of the air of unshakable integrity that Genoa projects. The city is not, and does not wish to be, Under the Tuscan Sun.

Genoa has been named a European Capital of Culture for 2004—an annual marketing exercise undertaken by the European Union. The idea is paradoxical, and possibly even alarming; one of Genoa's great charms is that nobody pays it any attention, and the visitor has it pretty much to himself. But when I was there with my family last summer, the magnificent sixteenth-century palazzi along the Via Garibaldi, the museums, and many of the crumbling old houses near the port were undergoing restoration. The priest of San Matteo was directing workmen under a tent of scaffolding. Great paintings were to be taken off the walls of private homes to be exhibited in public. Genoa was preparing to face the world.

The Ligurian coastline is a narrow shelf rising into sharply folded mountains. To the south, toward Pisa, lies the Riviera di Levante. To the west, toward the border with France, is the Riviera di Ponente. The famous beach resorts of the Italian Riviera, including Portofino and Rapallo to the south and San Remo and Bordighera to the west, can be reached in as little as thirty minutes by train or car. The entire area shares a single cuisine and culture, shaped less by the idyllic beaches than by the harsh and remote life imposed by the mountains.