The northwest region of Italy is known as Liguria and it was on the fifth day of our Emerald Princess cruise that we hit our first Italian port, the capital of the Ligurian region, Genoa. The city boasts the busiest port in Italy and it was the birthplace of Christopher Columbus but we wouldn’t be spending any time in it on this trip as we’d decided to book an excursion elsewhere.
We woke to a pretty typical day for the region at this time of year with a nice, warm temperature and a fair bit of humidity evident in the form of a low, light blanket of cloud. You can sometimes get too used to nothing but sunshine on a Mediterranean cruise so it can be nice to change it up now and then but the lack of brightness did have an impact on the appearance of the buildings surrounding the port area which looked as though they might really explode with colour if the sun had been out. Their colours were also very typical for buildings in Italy with pinks, oranges, yellows, and pale greens dominating.
The excursion we’d be taking for this day docked at Genoa would be a boat trip which, if you’ve read previous cruise travelogues or if you’ve just clicked that linked text back there, you’ll know we do a lot. Yes, even when we’re off on a cruise we often look out for trips we can do that then also involve boats. What can I say? We live in an island city in an island country. We like the water.
After a sensible breakfast – something not too filling because you never know quite what a boat trip will be like especially when it’s one, like this, that will be at sea rather than down a river – we disembarked to meet up with our excursion group dockside where we were given headphones in order that we would all be able to hear our guide. There was then a fairly considerable walk through the port buildings and around the rear to where our boat was waiting. The walk, in fact, was long enough that one person with walking difficulties got left behind and her son had to get off the boat to go find her which delayed our departure a little.
The boat was one of those with seating on two levels, most of it in benches on the top with some spaces below and under cover as well as exposed at the front and rear. With three tour groups taking the same boat and with ours being the last to board all of the seating on top was already nabbed by those who’d arrived first so we ended up sitting on the lower level and at the back which wouldn’t have been my first choice. As it would turn out this would be a blessing in disguise, though, as some of the boat trip was quite bumpy which would have made standing up top more difficult and I would have blocked views of the other passengers (I’m considerate like that, you know). Our location meant I was never in anyone’s way so could remain standing for the entire trip and use some of the railings around for support.
You can sometimes forget just how big your cruise ship is once you’ve been on it for a while. Comparing the size of Emerald Princess with the other vessels in Genoa’s port and with the buildings visible around from around the water level really brought it all back into perspective as we slowly left the city.
This video (temporarily removed) really shows you the size and length of the ship.
Our only prior stop in an Italian port had been three years earlier when we’d visited Naples aboard Royal Princess and we’d noticed the very distinctive artwork decorating a Moby cruise ferry nearby. We were pleased, then, to see another very prominent Looney Tunes-decorated ship of the fleet, Moby Otta. If we ever take a land-based holiday to Italy and have the time we are definitely going to have to look into booking a trip aboard one of these ferries just to see what they’re like inside. The Moby ship wasn’t alone in sporting impressive hull artwork as the port was also hosting a couple of Tirennia ships (also run by Moby) including the Batman-decorated Tirennia Nuraghes, as well as the GNV Rhapsody ferry which appeared to be running an advert for a music festival on its exterior. I’m not sure how I feel about adverts on ships but I’ve got an inkling that I don’t like them.
People who know me know that I like looking at the architecture of buildings and that my favourite style is brutalism. Before we were treated to hours of gazing across the water at very Italian-style houses and churches along the coastline, therefore, I was immensely pleased to spot a particularly nice-looking concrete beauty in the Genoan port. It was a very typical port structure, similar to ones we’d seen in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, likely built around the same time and for the same purposes, and now similarly abandoned-looking (I wonder if you can get photo tours of these places).
Harbour controls keep vessel speeds low in the port areas for obvious reasons which gave me plenty of opportunities to go snap-crazy with the camera (what a surprise) as we slowly made our way out to the open sea.
The only really interesting sight as we left Genoa was spotting a statue of the Virgin Mary with sceptre, crown, key, and baby Jesus at the port entrance. This was the first reminder that we were now most definitely in Roman Catholic territory and all the horrors of my childhood and my private education by monks (yeah, you didn’t know that about me, did you?) came flooding back. But then I remembered I was at sea on a cruising holiday and all the horrors quickly drowned and sank beneath the waves. Hooray for cruising!
The first stop on our boat trip excursion would be at the village of Camogli, a journey of around 35 minutes. Along the way we would be treated to views of the sometimes rugged Italian coastline and the many buildings erected to take advantage of the clearly fabulous views of the sea as well as some of the impressive infrastructure development in terms of scenic roads and arched bridges for road and rail traffic.
Bagni Santa Chiara is a popular location just to the east of Genoa, renowned for its sunset views and opportunities to enjoy them with cocktails and wine.
As we moved farther along the coast away from Genoa the colours of the buildings seemed to become brighter and closer in tone to those you see in all the super-saturated images begging you to visit this part of the world as if the Italian city had dulled the vibrancy of those in closer proximity; perhaps an indication of pollution from all the harbour activity, perhaps a statement about how busy life is nearer the city and how it reduces the opportunity to clean the buildings, perhaps the buildings are newer, perhaps they’ve just got better paint in the fancier spots of Liguria.
The church you can see in the first of the following pictures is the Church of Santa Maria Assunta while the impressive-looking building with the tower in the second photo is a school with scenery I’d probably find quite distracting if I were studying there. This was Porticciolo di Nervi, another one of those gorgeous little villages along Italy’s coast with undoubtedly beautiful evening views and thoroughly relaxing experiences waiting to be had when the weather’s just right.
A very short distance from that pleasant marina area was the train stop you’d want if you were visiting this area of Italy and wanted to use public transport. The church to the left is the Church of San Siro and the attractive little station with sea views is Genova Nervi.
Bagni Scogliera is a reasonably sheltered location with some picturesque rocky outcrops making for a pleasant and popular location to bathe in the Mediterranean water.
You never seem to be very far from a church in Italy and it’s quite likely that the locals use them to navigate in much the same way that we use pubs (our own buildings of religious worship).
Pieve Ligure is a municipality about 13 kilometres from Genoa, easily identifiable from sea by the huge arches carved into the rock at the base of the cliff on which it stands. A pieve is a rural church with a baptistry. This lesson from our course Things You Never Wanted To Know And Have Probably Already Forgotten was absolutely free.
The final place of note spotted on this first part of our boat trip was the municipality of Sori nestled in the valley between two hilly areas of the coast. Unlike some of the other places we’d passed, Sori was large enough to have a little bit of interesting history behind it. It’s claimed that the city was founded by Greek immigrants but the first time Sori was mentioned in writing was in the twelfth century. In 1580 Sori was affected by the plague, evidence for this coming from the number of wills that were hastily drawn up and saved at that time. Just four years later 1500 Algerian pirates in 22 galleys landed at Sori and sacked it over the course of a day, taking 134 people (mostly women, of course) as slaves. Money was collected to pay for the release of the slaves but to no avail and even pleas to Donna Zenobia del Carretto, the wife of the Admiral of the Genoese Fleet, Giovanni Andrea Doria, met with failure. The bridges you can see in the photos were built after the second world war, the originals having been naturally targeted by allied bombing raids.
In the next post of this travelogue series I’ll detail what we got up to in Camogli, the first of the three stops we would make on this excursion along Italy’s coastline by boat.