Genoa occupies the center of the Ligurian arc. The city began along the harbor in the sixth century and then expanded uphill, so that modern Genoa, with its shipping companies and its convention centers, stands above and to the side of nineteenth-century Genoa, whose broad and gracious boulevards strongly resemble the Paris of Haussmann; and this in turn stands above the centro storico. We spent no time at all in the contemporary city, though it bears noting that Genoa is a place of 700,000 souls and one of Europe's leading ports. We lingered in the Genoa of boulevards principally to return to the thoroughly charming Bristol Palace Hotel, which appeared to be the one and only elegant tourist hotel in the entire city. Genoa, for us, was the old city, the port, and some of the outlying areas.

Genoa must have been the most glamorous city in Europe by 1550. It was then that the great families, already impossibly venerable, built the broad cobblestoned boulevard known as the Strada Nuova, and now as the Via Garibaldi. The Genovese themselves must have goggled at this palace-lined avenue, for it was said to be the only street in this famously cramped and impassable city wide enough to accommodate a carriage. Today, it is one of the greatest historic streets in Europe. Many of the palazzi are now banks or insurance companies, although they have been thrown open to the public for Genoa '04. The Palazzo Rosso and the Palazzo Bianco are two of the city's finest art museums. The Palazzo Doria Tursi, an immense building constructed by the Grimaldis, who were forced to sell it to the Dorias after a series of financial reversals (a timeless theme in Genoa's mercantile culture), is now City Hall. The palace has the classic, elegant style of late Renaissance Genoa: a pillared, open courtyard leading to a broad staircase up to a loggia enclosing galleries. Various rooms—in restauro, like practically everything else when we were there—contain letters signed by Christopher Columbus, widely believed to be a native son, and a violin built by Guarneri for Paganini, who was without doubt a native son.

It wasn't always clear how deeply we were allowed to peer. At 12 Via Garibaldi, we wandered into a simple, vaulted foyer. Walking hesitantly up the stairs, we came to a halt at some kind of showroom; on the other side of a glass wall, I could see what appeared to be a parlor with fine stucco tracery along the ceiling. A salesman eagerly waved us in, then gave us an impromptu tour, in English and Italian. We were, it turned out, in a bridal-registry store that had once been known as the Palazzo Campanella. Each room had its own little treasure, but best of all was a wildly gilt dining room remodeled in the style of Versailles by Cristoforo Spinola, who had served as ambassador to France in the late eighteenth century and had then purchased the house.

If we liked this sort of thing, the salesman said, we might want to take a look at a café named the Via Garibaldi, around the corner; the food, he said, was not too bad. And so we discovered, down a tiny alleyway, the single coolest spot in Genoa: a vaulted space with pillars running incongruously down the middle, armchairs, and newspapers in four languages. The Via Garibaldi is a Renaissance café. The bartender, who is Albanian and speaks English, makes a particularly exquisite version of shakerato, which is iced coffee mixed in a cocktail shaker. We had a genuinely refined and remarkably inexpensive lunch; the panna cotta, in three shades of off-white, was out of this world. A magician was working the tables. Our son, Alex, demanded that we come back two days later, when a jazz quartet would be playing on the little raised stage. Sometimes we just stopped in for a shakerato, which you find yourself doing a lot in Genoa, since the air-conditioning is either pitiful or nonexistent. We often reflected on the fact that we never would have found the Via Garibaldi if we hadn't wandered into the bridal-registry store.