Wed Sept 17 We arrived in Genoa after dark but the hotel was only about 200 yards from the station. The room was small, it was in a 'tough' part of town (getting in and out required a code to open the door), the room price included breakfast which was thoroughly unappetizing, but we would only be there for two nights. We had trouble finding an open restaurant that evening but finally found one just before they closed the kitchen. Fortunately, the room was quiet and we got a good night sleep. We hit the streets early in the morning. Genoa is historically renowned for its maritime industry so we targeted their Maritime Museum first. It's located on the waterfront near the University. We arrived before it opened and had some time to find a pastry and some fresh-squeezed orange juice for breakfast and sit outside and watch the college students. The museum was well done and quite interesting. The highlights were several very large boat construction exhibits and an exhibit on the novelist Joseph Conrad. We knew he had written a lot about the sea but didn't know he was actually a sea captain and spent many years on the sea. We certainly didn't expect a Polish/English writer to command such a significant exhibit in a Genoa museum. Genoa is a city of two personalities. It has always been and continues to be a large commercial port which makes its waterfront less than attractive -what we in Santa Barbara would call a funk zone. But because of this commercial activity Genoa has always had a considerable portion of wealthy citizens (bankers, merchants, ship owners, etc.) who built mini-palaces, regularly trying to outdo their neighbor. A lot of the wealth was based on speculation so as one Genoan lost a fortune, another Nouveau riche individual would acquire his palace and remodel and renovate. Thus the palaces became more and more elaborate over the years.

We toured the Museo di Palazzo Reale which is an old Palace that is now a museum as the name suggests. There was an orientation video in English that we watched before touring. Every surface of every room was so ornate with lots of statuary. It was hard to imagine someone being comfortable living here - looked like it was more for entertaining and receptions. Perhaps we didn't get to see the specific rooms where they lived. The one bedroom we did see had red velvet covering all the walls and doors. The paintings were embedded into the walls, that is, a niche was carved out so that the painting and gold gilt frame could be sunk in, making its front surface in line with the rest of the wall.

As we were walking around the town it definitely had a different feel than Florence. It seemed very compact. Being bounded by the ocean on one side and the steep hills on another, Genoans were more limited in where they could spread. The buildings were taller than those in Florence and they did flow up the steep hillsides. One nice result was that there was much less vehicle traffic and you felt much safer walking the streets. There are cable cars running up the hills which are part of the city mass transit system. We rode one up into the hills, got off at the top and explored. On our ride up, a mother was picking up her children from school. She had the youngest one with her when we got on at the bottom and the middle school child joined them at a stop part way up the hill. At the top we got off and walked along a trail in a park. We could smell fresh bread baking somewhere and it drove us crazy as it was past our lunch time. It was a beautiful park. We couldn't find an open restaurant at the top, mostly a residential area, but we did get a nice view out over the city from someone's driveway.

We visited several churches -always wonderful art works to be seen there. Decorative elements adorned the buildings, as in Florence but the elements for the most part were confined to the arches over the entrances and windows. In Florence, the decorative elements would leave no surface unadorned. Two streets we walked down (via Balbi and via Garibaldi) are lined with former mini-palaces. A few of them house museums, some house University departments or government offices, others are banks and other businesses -no individual could afford to maintain the palaces these days. In the Piazza di San Lorenzo there was a gorgeous church with white and dark green marble forming zebra stripes on the outside and many altars inside. Stone lions guarded the steps up to the church and they had a look on their faces that we couldn't quite identify - sad, puzzled, ......not the usual regal or threatening looks.

Thu Sept 18 - Happy 15th anniversary to our son and his wife, Darren and Carrie!