Vsevolod Jul 28 '10, 22:21
The Port of Genoa is the natural outlet to the sea for northern Italy's most industrialised area and the ideal location to serve the industrial sector and European consumer markets.
GENOA has been badly neglected by tourism in the twentieth century, though it was for a thousand years one of the two great Italian trade and banking ports in the Mediterranean, the other being Venice. Before our era Genoa was celebrated by such giants of art and literature as Peter Paul Rubens, Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad. It long maintained close relations with the Low Countries, whose painters, ranging from Rogier van der Weyden to Anthony Van Dyck, worked in Genoa for years on end. When the great empires of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries directed Europe's attention to more-distant regions of the world, Genoa, long Venice's rival for dominance of Mediterranean trade, diminished in world importance. Venice, floating at the head of the Adriatic, continued to brandish its glories for the traveler, while Genoa receded, somewhat like Marseilles. In the nineteenth century it became the port of entry for the rising industries of Turin and Milan, but Italy's unfortunate choice of sides in the Second World War resulted in a horrid vengeance on the city, for the British bombed the port to keep German ships from supplying Nazi military efforts, and the Germans held on to it till the very end. The city had a lot to recover from, and its restoration is even now not quite complete. Lately I was lucky enough to spend a month nearby; with increasing pleasure on each daily excursion, I explored Genoa at leisure. It's a marvel.
Italy
