We quickly realized that the trick in Genoa is to open yourself to the accidental. The streets of the centro storico are so tiny and crooked that you can't fail to get lost after a few minutes. At the same time, you can't get lost for long, since if you head downhill you soon reach the port. And so you're free to follow your curiosity. We would simply walk out the door of the Bristol Palace and plunge downward into the labyrinth. One day, we got so lost trying to find the Palazzo Spinola, one of Genoa's chief museums, that we had to ask for directions. A Genovese woman patiently explained the route to us. Following her instructions, we soon found ourselves on the Via delle Mele, a sleepy byway where women in clinging skirts sat chatting on the stoops of their street-front apartments, waiting for customers, or leaned against the ancient walls in postures of utter boredom. Twelve-year-old Alex looked on wide-eyed, and said, "Is that . . . ?" It was, I said—possibly the world's sleepiest and most picturesque red-light district. My friend Carla later told me that she used to leave her little daughter with the girls when she went shopping.

Lack of available space forced the Genovese, like New Yorkers, to build up rather than out. The streets are lined with pre-elevator buildings that rise up to seven floors, and the cor-nice line of one building seems to lean into the one across the street. The alleyways are almost always dark and often faintly ominous, as if one of the Fieschi's hired assassins is lurking in a doorway with a cutlass. But of course that's also the source of their magic: You never know what you'll stumble upon. On the Via Canneto il Lungo, we found a shoe box-sized barbershop with glittering blue Art Deco mirrors and fixtures; along the Pre, the ancient street that served as Genoa's faubourg a thousand years ago, we discovered a seventeenth-century hospital, now a hardware store. And then, as we turned away from the harbor and walked up to the Cathedral of San Lorenzo, my wife, Buffy, saw a line forming at a little walk-in shop on the Via Canneto il Curto, just to the left. Buffy takes the view that one should get in this kind of line first and ask questions later. At the end of the line, it turned out, was the softest and most fragrant focaccia we had in Genoa, the city where focaccia is said to have been invented.

Genoa stretches quite a way along the sea to the east, and at night the townsfolk stroll the lido, which is crowded with restaurants and cafés. The promenade terminates at Boccadasse, a tiny fishing village that's invisible from the road. When we visited one afternoon, we walked down a stairway cut into the wall and found ourselves standing on a beach full of small fishing boats that had been drawn up on the sand and overturned in tight rows. The fishing was done for the day. Women were carrying groceries back to the jumble of houses along the strand; men were playing boccie in the lee of the seawall, the older ones watching silently. The Genovese, in their infinite wisdom, had left Boccadasse to itself.