Genoa in Books: The City That Poets Never Left

There is a city that exists entirely within a single line of verse: “The wall that still stands today” — no, wait a moment, let me start again. There is a city that appears in twentieth-century Italian poetry far more often than one might think, and almost always with the same face: a gray port, an uphill climb, a light that cuts through the alleys like a blade. That city is Genoa, and its relationship with literature is not a minor chapter in a textbook. It is a century-long familiarity, made up of poets born there, writers who passed through, and an urban geography that allowed itself to be written upon almost without noticing.

The paradox is that Genoa has never had the literary charm of Florence or the mythology of Naples. Yet Eugenio Montale, one of the three or four truly important twentieth-century Italian poets, grew up between Genoa and Cinque Terre, and in that Ligurian light — harsh, cutting, never comforting — he found the language for his entire body of work. It is not a biographical detail: it is the key to reading Cuttlefish Bones.

The light that made a poet

Montale was born in Genoa in 1896, into a merchant family that spent summers in Monterosso. He grew up between the port and the cliffs, between the metallic noise of the industrial city and the mineral silence of Cinque Terre. It is in that gap — between urban gray and coastal aridity — that his poetic gaze was formed, made of landscapes scorched by the sun, dry stone walls, agaves, the sea as both hostile and necessary presence.

Cuttlefish Bones, published in 1925, is not a book about Genoa in the literal sense: it is a book born from the Ligurian perception of the world, that sense of hardness and essentiality that anyone who grows up among cliffs and olive trees carries inside forever. Montale himself recounted many times, in interviews and autobiographical writings, how important that land had been to his formation: not a setting, but a way of seeing.

Caproni and Sbarbaro: the poets of the caruggi

If Montale looks toward the Liguria of cliffs, Giorgio Caproni looks into the real city itself. Born in Livorno but Genoese by adoption since childhood, Caproni walked through the caruggi of the historic center with the gaze of someone who knows every corner, every climb, every smell of fried food and brine. In his poetry Genoa returns often not as a postcard backdrop but as a mental structure: the vertical city, made of ups and downs, is reflected in the very rhythm of his verses, broken, folded, never extended.

Camillo Sbarbaro, born in Savona but Ligurian to the bone, instead recounted with almost scientific harshness the port and the life that circled around it: the sailors, the prostitutes, the misery and toil of port work. His collection Pianissimo (1914) carries within it that typically Genoese understatement — the reticence, the modesty, the measured word — that anyone who has spent time in this city still recognizes today in the way people speak.

The port as character

What unites these three poets, beyond differences in style and generation, is the way they treat the port: not as a scenic backdrop but as a living presence, almost a character. The Port of Genoa in twentieth-century Ligurian literature is never merely a place of cargo transit — it is the threshold between the city and the world, the point where the Italian provinces face the unknown, trafficking, departures with no return.

Ferrante’s port: a century later, the same wound

A leap forward of almost a century, and it is striking how that same idea of the port as an existential frontier reemerges in one of the most-read voices of contemporary Italian narrative. Elena Ferrante, whose true name remains a now-legendary editorial mystery, set significant pages of her work in Genoa, restoring to the city a role that is never purely decorative.

In Ferrante’s novels the Genoese port returns with the same function it had for Sbarbaro: threshold, caesura, a place of passage between a before and after. It is no coincidence that so much narrative that passes through Genoa chooses the port as a symbol — it is simply what the port has always been for this city: the reason it exists, the place where city life mingles with that of those arriving from outside and those about to depart forever.

De André: the language of the port become song

One cannot speak of Genoa and literature without broadening the discussion to singer-songwriter music, which found one of its highest voices in this city. Fabrizio De André was not a novelist, but his songs — in particular the album Crêuza de mä from 1984, written together with Mauro Pagani — are in every sense literature set to music, and perhaps the most authentic testimony of the relationship between this city and the word.

“Shadows of walls, walls of sailors, where do you come from, where are you going?”

— Fabrizio De André, “Crêuza de mä”, 1984

The line opens the album and captures in a few Genoese syllables an image worth an entire novel: shadows of walls, walls of sailors, from where you come, where you go. It is the question the port has always posed to anyone who crosses it, and De André wrote it in the very dialect of the city itself, restoring literary dignity to a language that until then had been considered almost purely a folkloric matter.

A language that becomes literature

De André’s gesture — writing sophisticated songs in pure Genoese — had a cultural effect that goes beyond music. It demonstrated that the dialect could sustain complex poetic images, stratified metaphors, historical and nautical references. Whoever walks today through the alleys of the historic center and still hears an elderly person speak in pure Genoese, is listening to the same language that De André transformed into poetry.

The Literary Places Worth Visiting

All this literary geography is not abstract: it has precise addresses, places you can still walk through with the same steps as the poets who described them. The Porto Antico, with its Darsena and the Lanterna standing watch since 1128, remains the most densely meaningful point: it is here that Sbarbaro, Ferrante, De André converge, each with their own version of the same landscape.

The caruggi of the historic center, one of Europe’s best-preserved medieval urban fabrics, are Caproni’s Genoa: narrow, dark at noon, suddenly luminous where a clearing opens onto a church or small square. Walking them without hurrying, perhaps in the evening when tourists thin out, is probably the most authentic way to enter the sensibility of those verses.

For those wanting to venture beyond the center, the Boccadasse area, with its boats drawn up on shore and colorful houses clustered around the small bay, still conveys today that atmosphere of a fishing village suspended in time that inspired generations of Ligurian writers, even when they don’t mention it explicitly.

The Human Type Behind the Verses

Behind each of these texts is a recurring figure in Genoese culture: the man of few words, reserved to the point of brusqueness, who hides under reticence an emotional intensity that rarely explodes and precisely for that reason weighs heavily. It is the character that Sbarbaro transfers into his sparse verses, that Montale brings into his poetry “that brings no comfort,” that De André restores in the characters of his songs — prostitutes, smugglers, sailors, all treated with a pietas that never slides into sentimentality.

It is no coincidence that the Genoese, in popular tradition, is described as closed, distrustful of strangers but loyal to the end with those who have won his trust. This character trait, more than any monument, is perhaps the true thread that binds Ligurian literature across a century of authors vastly different from one another in background and style.

What Remains Today of That Literary Genoa

Walking through the city today, the signs of this literary history are not commemorative plaques or dedicated museums — they are more subtle, and for that reason more authentic. They are the smell of salt air mingling with that of freshly made pesto in the caruggi’s food shops. They are the voices that still, especially among older Genoese, slip into dialect for an expression, a phrase, a way of speaking that no Italian translation ever truly captures.

Above all, it is the light, that Ligurian light that shaped Montale’s vision: harsh at noon, golden at sunset, capable of transforming the same cliff from threatening to heartbreaking in just a few minutes. Those staying in one of the residences in the heart of Genoa have the privilege of watching it change several times a day, simply by looking out a window.

A curiosity about the port and writing

A detail that rarely emerges in school textbooks: the port of Genoa, by its very nature as a place of international transit, has always attracted writers and intellectuals passing through, not only those born Genoese. Throughout the twentieth century the city was a port of call, a temporary refuge, an embarkation point to America for thousands of emigrants — and that function as a threshold, a place where stories intersect without stopping, has left an imprint still found in contemporary narratives set here, Ferrante included.

Reading Genoa by walking it

The best way to understand this literary geography is not to stay at a desk with an anthology, but to physically traverse the same places. Head down to Porto Antico when the light becomes oblique, lose yourself in the caruggi without a specific destination, climb up to Castelletto with the Sant’Anna funicular, inaugurated in 1891 (or by the 1909 elevator), to look down at that Genoa that poets have seen from within — these are gestures that give body, temperature, and scent back to the verses.

Those staying in one of our residences in the Castelletto area can enjoy each evening that same panoramic view over the old town that has nourished the imagination of generations of writers: the rooftops, the port, the Lanterna lighthouse that lights up when the sky darkens. It’s a perspective worth more than any literary description.

If you too want to write your Genoese chapter

Genoa doesn’t ask to be read before being lived: it asks the opposite. Walk it first, let yourself be surprised by its dark alleyways and sudden squares, and only then — perhaps in the evening, with a glass of Ligurian white wine in hand — open Montale, or put on Crêuza de mä. You’ll discover that verses, read after having walked those same stones, take on a different weight.

If this city that has inspired poets and novelists is calling to you, we at genovabb.it are here to let you experience Genoa from the right vantage point: in the heart of the caruggi, by the port, or up high in Castelletto with the city spread at your feet. You can book your stay and begin to write, in your own way, the Genoese chapter of your story.