Liguria

Liguria is a thin crescent of coast pinned between the Apennines and the sea — at its narrowest barely 35 kilometers from mountain to shore — and that geography turned its people seaward from the start. The original Ligures, a pre-Roman people, gave the region its name; then came Rome, which made Genoa a thriving port. But Liguria's defining chapter is the rise of Genoa as one of the great maritime republics of the medieval Mediterranean.

From the 11th century, "La Superba" — Genoa the Proud — built a trading empire to rival Venice, with colonies and outposts stretched across the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. After crushing rival Pisa at the Battle of Meloria in 1284, Genoa dominated the western seas. Its golden age came under the admiral Andrea Doria in the 16th century, when Genoese merchant-bankers, financing the Spanish crown, became some of the richest men in Europe — a wealth still written into the frescoed palazzi of the city's UNESCO-listed center. Genoa was also, by tradition, the birthplace of Christopher Columbus.

Poets, Cliffs, and Terraces

The coast splits into two rivieras — the Riviera di Ponente to the west, the Riviera di Levante to the east — and its drama has drawn artists and writers for centuries. In the early 1800s the English Romantic poets Shelley and Byron settled on the Gulf of La Spezia, which has been called the "Gulf of Poets" ever since; Shelley drowned in its waters in 1822. East of Genoa, the five villages of the Cinque Terre cling to cliffs above the sea, their hillsides carved into stone terraces over centuries of patient labor — now a UNESCO World Heritage landscape reachable mainly by train, boat, and footpath.

A Cuisine of Green and Sea

Liguria gave the world some of Italy's most beloved foods: pesto alla genovese, pounded from the region's intensely fragrant basil; focaccia, eaten here even at breakfast; farinata, the chickpea pancake; and trofie pasta to carry the pesto. It's a green, sea-facing kitchen — and Genoa takes it seriously enough to host a World Pesto Championship, fought with mortar and pestle.