There is a street in Genoa that, before it ever became a place, became the title of a record album. It doesn’t happen to many cities in the world: that a very narrow alley, damp, populated with goods and lives on the margins, becomes the most quoted verse of Italian singer-songwriter music. Via del Campo existed before Fabrizio De André, of course. But after 1967, when that street enters the title of a song that speaks of a prostitute with “a raw diamond in her eyes,” Via del Campo is no longer just an address. It became a piece of urban mythology, and tourists who today stroll through it with smartphones in hand are searching for something that maps don’t mark: the soul of a poet who told the story of Genoa like no one else.
Fabrizio De André was not a singer who spoke about Genoa from the outside. He was a Genovese who lived the caruggi, breathed them, knew them in their most hidden folds — those that the “respectable” Genovese preferred not to see. He wrote of prostitutes, thieves, sailors, transvestites, anarchists, restoring literary dignity to those whom the official city considered waste. And it is precisely in this gaze from below, loving and without mercy at once, that lies the true legacy of the singer-songwriter for those who today wish to understand Genoa.
The well-bred boy and the forbidden caruggi
De André was born in Genoa in 1940, into a bourgeois, wealthy family, with a father who would later become the city’s vice-mayor. A childhood that could have unfolded peacefully among drawing rooms and law offices — and indeed Fabrizio did graduate in jurisprudence, almost to meet family expectations. But his true sentimental education happened elsewhere: in the bars of the harbor, among street musicians, among the faces of those who truly inhabited the old center, rather than just passing through it.
The caruggi of those years — the same ones we stroll through today cleaned up and photographed — were a world apart from “upper” Genoa of noble palaces and commercial streets. A harbor zone, of sailors on leave, of prostitution, of misery and of a multifaceted humanity that the city’s official rhetoric preferred to ignore. De André entered it as a young man, perhaps partly out of bourgeois curiosity toward the forbidden, but what comes out of it is not a tourist of illegality: he is a witness who will learn to tell that world with a compassion that has no equal in Italian song.
Via del Campo and the port: the sentimental geography of a poet
Anyone seeking today’s Genoa of De André inevitably begins with Via del Campo, in the heart of the caruggi that can still be discovered by taking a leisurely walk. It is one of the oldest streets of the historic center, today revitalized by shops, studios and venues, but still bearing in its walls something of its past as a popular and lively street. Don’t expect a museum street: Via del Campo lives, and perhaps that is precisely the best way to honor the song that made it famous.
But De André’s world does not end in a single street. The harbor — the real one, the working one, not the contemporary tourist showcase of Porto Antico — is the second great setting of his work. Sailors, taverns, the wait for ships, the goodbyes and returns: all of this returns in songs like La città vecchia, an almost cinematic portrait of popular Genoa with its alleys overlooking the docks, with its “old thieves” and its “carriages.” It is a Genoa that today can still be intuited by walking toward Sottoripa or along the alleys that descend toward the sea, where the smell of fried food mixes with the salty scent of the harbor.
“She whom by day you call with contempt a public woman, she who by night sets the price for your desires.”
— Fabrizio De André, La città vecchia, composed in 1962 and originally published in 1965 on 45 rpm, before being collected in the album Tutto Fabrizio De André
This verse tells more than a thousand tourist descriptions what those alleyways were like in the Sixties: a world left to itself, forgotten by institutions, and yet alive with an intense humanity that De André chose to narrate without moralizing.
The protagonists of the songs: the marginalized become poetry
If we had to give a face to De André’s Genoa, it would not be that of a doge or a merchant, but that of the invisible inhabitants of the caruggi: the prostitute of Via del Campo, the transgender Andrea who recurs in several songs, the nameless sailors of many ballads, the anarchists and deserters from his more political songs. They are characters of an underground Genoa, the one that the “respectable” city would pass through with averted eyes.
There is a biographical detail that tells this relationship well: De André himself used to say that when he was young, in the bars of the historic center, he had met characters who would later become direct or indirect inspiration for his lyrics. He didn’t invent from nothing: he observed, listened, transformed into poetry what he saw happening in the alleyways. This gaze of his — never judgmental, always empathetic towards those living on the margins — is probably the reason why his songs have never seemed dated, despite more than fifty years having passed since they were written.
The very language that De André would use in some of his most mature works, Genoese in Crêuza de mä from 1984, is not a folkloristic affectation but a profoundly identity-driven choice. The album, set in an imaginary port that synthesizes all the ports of the Mediterranean, uses the dialect to tell of merchants, sailors and worlds that interweave — a poetic and partly artificial language, constructed by De André more from memory and intuition than from rigorous philological recovery, capable of blending words of different origins into a cosmopolitan idiom meant for listening before literal understanding.
The signs in the present: where to seek De André today
Walking today through the historic center with De André’s songs in your head completely changes how you look at the caruggi. Via del Campo remains the natural starting point: at number 29 rosso (Via del Campo 29r, CAP 16124) you can still find Viadelcampo29rosso, the museum-shop dedicated to De André and the Genoese school of singer-songwriters, run by the Genoa Museums. Inside are preserved original vinyl records, historical photographs, autographed sheet music and memorabilia — including one of De André’s guitars — that keep the musical memory of the neighborhood alive. It is a good first step for those who want to follow the singer-songwriter’s traces without relying solely on imagination.
From there, the alleyways fan out toward the port, toward Piazza delle Erbe and toward Sottoripa, the ancient arcades that for centuries hosted shops and warehouses just a few steps from the maritime docks. They remain today the hinge between the city and the sea, the same thin boundary that De André sang about as a place of passage, of waiting, of departures not always voluntary.
Those who want to widen their perspective can climb up to Castelletto, with its panoramic terrace accessible via the public lift: from there you can see the entire historic center at once, the crowded rooftops, the churches, the port in the distance — the same stratified Genoa that De André carried within as a sentimental geography, viewed no longer from below in the alleyways but from above, in a perspective that helps one understand how those worlds coexisted just a few hundred meters apart.
A curiosity: the kidnapping and an unbroken relationship with Sardinia
A lesser-known chapter, but one that helps explain the complexity of the man behind the songs: in 1979 De André was kidnapped in Sardinia, where he spent part of the year on his Agnata estate. The traumatic experience never drove him away from the island: a few years later, working alongside Massimo Bubola, he would write some of the most intense songs of his repertoire, once again showing that ability to transform pain and observation of reality into poetic material. It’s the same mechanism he had applied to Genoa’s alleyways fifteen years before: to look without turning away, and to tell the story.
Genova, still today, as he told it
Whoever arrives in Genova for the first time today, and chooses to stay in the historic center among the caruggi, soon realizes that De André’s city has not disappeared at all. It has changed, certainly: the port slums of that era today coexist with boutiques and trendy venues, and Via del Campo no longer has the same air of marginality. But the urban fabric — the narrow alleys, the immediate encounter between working-class houses and noble palaces, the physical and cultural proximity between the center and the port — has remained substantially intact, also protected by the UNESCO recognition that since 2006 has safeguarded the Strade Nuove and the system of Palazzi dei Rolli.
Walking through the caruggi in the evening, when voices become quieter and warm lights spill out from doorways, still brings back something of that suspended atmosphere that De André could capture better than anyone else. There’s no need to imagine too much: just look up at the peeling buildings, listen to the echo of footsteps on the stone, let yourself be surprised by a sudden courtyard or an illuminated window. The Genova that inspired his most beautiful songs is still, for the most part, this one.
If this Genova — authentic, layered, capable of telling stories of the forgotten with the dignity of great literature — is calling you, we are here. Our residences in the historic center allow you to sleep just steps from Via del Campo, to wake up in the morning and find yourselves immersed in the same alleys that shaped a poet. You can book your stay and discover, step by step, the Genova that De André made immortal.
