Experienced travellers have mixed feelings about Italy’s fifth city and largest port. There are very expensive shops in Via XX Settembre; there are the three caravels of Columbus picked out in flowers, sailing across a green slope; the Eternal Flame commemorating the dead of the Second World War; and the Avenue of the Partisan Brigades. Genoa, known to some as ‘Little Stalingrad’, was always proud of its anti-Fascist record. The city has turned her palaces into municipal bureaux and allowed an urban race-track to miss by the slightest margin the heroic sculpture at Quarto dei Mille, where Garibaldi departed with his Thousand on that ‘mad but sublime’ adventure of 1860 which brought the Italian south a step nearer Italian unity. Locals seem to be unaware of Mazzini’s tomb, Daniel O’Connell’s statue (Genoa was a haven of refuge for the 19thC revolutionaries) or 50 other monuments that would constitute major sights in many towns. Instead they rge you to see the 16thC Lanterna, the most powerful lighthouse in the Mediterranean, often visible from seaward before the domes, towers and skyscrapers of the city, climbing back into green uplands, came into view.

The art galleries, unusually for Italy, are rarely crowded. At the two civic galleries, Palazzi Rosso and Palazzo Bianco, both on Via Garibaldi, you can still be almost alone while admiring the Veronese, the Reni, the Caravaggio and a whole roomful of Bernardo Strozzis, plus significant works by Van Dyck, David, Memling, Rubens and other Dutch and Flemish masters.

Genoa is La Superba (‘The Proud’), both aristocratic and mercantile. Her name goes back to Janus, supposedly a great-grandson of Noah. Consequently to seek out Columbus’s birthplace and scour the dirty alleyways where he played as a child is to make a pilgrimage into a fairly recent past, a mere 500 years or so.

To see the house, or rather the house built on the site of one believed to have been owned by the navigator’s father, take Vico Dritto di Ponticello (‘Straight Alleyway of the Little Bridge’) from Piazza Dante, the city centre. The building adjoins Porta Soprana, a massive gatehouse in the 9thC perimeter wall. Fragments are incorporated in Genoa’s medieval walls, to which you gain access by brick stairs. You can walk along them.

Here you are in the scrambling network of lanes and carrugi (passages) which belonged to the old port and every turning brings a surprise – a fountain, a triangular cloister, an ancient nail-studded door, a statuette in a niche, a grotesque lamp. For detailed exploration, get the free boolet Genoa the Old City from the local tourist office, if it is still in print. (You need strong legs for Genoa; there are hardly 20 paces of level ground except on the water-front.) Churches abound, ancient and modern, simple and ostentatious. San Sisto on Via Pre near the dockyard stands on the site of a church of AD 260 and an inscription relates to the destruction of the ‘serpent Basilisk’ in AD 580. The cathedral of San Lorenzo, striped black and white inside and out, stands near Porta Soprana and the Ducal Palace. Its Saracenic touches recall the Crusaders who brought much wealth to Genoa. They also brought San Lorenzo a cup hollowed out of an enormous emerald, the tazza di smeralda, reputedly the Holy Grail from which Christ drank at the Last Supper. It is still on display in the Cathedral Treasury. The story goes that Bonaparte borrowed the original and substituted a goblet of green glass.

Via Garibaldi’s palaces and mansions are solid proof of this sea-republic’s eminence in trade and war. (When Pisa challenged her supremacy, Genoa sent a fleet to fill up Pisa’s harbour with stones.) Genoa iremains a notable shopping centre with hypermarkets, street-markets and chic boutiques; a gastronomic Mecca; a yachting harbour and ocean terminal. Fiera Congress, a surrealistic trade-fair and exhibitions centre, occupies far too much of the downtown sea front beside Piazzale Kennedy (the old Viale Brigate Partigiane survives alongside). The football stadium is a sensation, the Teatro della Corte rivals the re-furbished Carlo Felice opera house in splendour.

Three funicular railways help you explore areas you wouldn’t otherwise see. One, Sant’Anna goes between Piazza Portello and Corso Magenta. The second, Zecca-Righi goes between Largo della Zecca along Righi Hill. The third, actually a rack railway, links Piazza del Principe with Granarolo.