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Genoa is, to the English reading public, the least known major city in Italy. In America, Genoa's principal claim to fame is that the city has given its name to a peculiar salami—this is a never-ending source of amusement to the Genoese, who readily admit that their region is noted for poor salami. Few Americans know that their favorite pair of jeans owes its name to Gênes, the French word for the city. Blue cotton cloth, a noted Genoese product, was reexported from France in bales marked "Gênes." It is ironic and typical that a mispronounced French word for this city is unwittingly on the lips of millions of people. Everyone knows that Columbus came from Genoa, but people are usually hard pressed to think of a reason for believing that is an important fact about him or Genoa. Students of the violin know that Niccolo Paganini came from Genoa, yet the city's contribution to the arts has never earned it accolades. Fans of republican government know that Giuseppe Mazzini came from Genoa and that if the rest of Italy had listened to him, it would have been spared some terrible episodes in its twentieth-century history. Since James Boswell brought the plight of the Corsicans, whom the Genoese ruled for more than five centuries, to international notice in 1768, Genoa has been reputed to be a decayed eighteenth-century tyrant.[1] Some outsiders wondered what sort of people would brutalize a place like Corsica for so long.
Genoa is just a name for a place; the Genoese are an interesting people. Liguria is arguably the most isolated region of Italy, along with Sicily and Sardinia. The Genoese tend to go their own way—in their view, ahead of their fellow Italians, to whom this simply confirms the reputation of the Genoese for being an arrogant and aloof people. When the Red Brigades arose in Genoa and elsewhere in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they continued this Genoese tradition of pointing the way to change, for better or worse. Genoa led in the rise of capitalism, slavery, and colonization in the Middle Ages, international public finance in the sixteenth century, poor relief in the seventeenth century, republicanism in the nineteenth century. In this century Genoa was a strong early center of fascism that became one of the western anchors of the Red Belt across northern Italy. Genoa marched to the proverbial beat of its own drummer; aristocratic partisans in the mountains fought fascists and had sons who became respectable communists or professors of economics. Still today the leading port of Italy, Genoa retains its cool indifference to outsiders, be they Asian or African seamen, Sicilians, or people from nearby Milan.
The history of this complex people must be approached gradually and simultaneously from as many sides as possible. The themes of my predecessors provide a good place to begin to look for perspectives on the Genoese. Patriotism and a nostalgia for the greatness of Genoa animated Michel-Giuseppe Canale, writing in the mid-nineteenth century.[2] Modern historians have contemporary biases. Teofilo De Negri, the author of the most comprehensive history of the Genoese, thought that their love of liberty, both personal and collective, was the enduring theme of their history.[3] (De Negri also wrote of a Genoese peevishness and a love of secrecy, less attractive traits.)[4] The poor in Genoa would have something to say about the meaning of personal liberty there, as would the many slaves who as items of commerce made so many Genoese fortunes. The Genoese republic survived in one way or another down to 1797; it became a restive and unhappy province of the kingdom of Sardinia and then Italy in the nineteenth century. The Genoese republic was not widely admired, however, and the founding fathers of the American republic found nothing to emulate in this corrupt relic of a sinister age.[5] But in a Europe of monarchs and petty tyrants, the Genoese at least tried to govern themselves for nearly a thousand years, with some bouts of despair during which they consigned their state to foreigners.
Robert S. Lopez was the most distinguished student of medieval and Renaissance Genoa in this century. A refugee from fascism and its political and racial policies, Lopez several times reminded me in emphatic terms that his family was from Milan, not Genoa. When I asked him why he had not written a history of Genoa, he gave me no answer and an impenetrable look, which I believe I now understand after fifteen years of work. Lopez had four themes of Genoese history: (1) a strong religiosity that brooked no church interference in practical affairs, (2) "irrepressible individualism," (3) "family clannishness," and (4) "a propensity to coopt successful or promising newcomers."[6] Yet what people claim a lack of piety or seem especially religious to outsiders? Still, Genoese religiosity, whether seen in acts of crusading or charity, merits close attention.
In lists that associate Italian cities with the seven deadly sins, pride or vainglory—the parents of one style of individualism—usually defines Genoa. This spirit of individualism in Genoa manifested itself most clearly in the unwillingness of the Genoese to cooperate with one another. Just as the city frequently found itself without allies, individual Genoese, while loving their hometown, often expected to make their own way in the world. Clannishness is perhaps a judgment best made by someone like Lopez, who was raised there. But the saying usually applied to Florence, that a good Florentine is always at home, seems even more suited to the Genoese and their deserted evening streets. Some distinctive features of Genoese family life, and the marvelous records that illuminate them, will be one of the main themes here. The Genoese were happy to co-opt successful outsiders and even in some cases to purchase them, whether from nearby Sardinia early on or the Ukraine or sub-Saharan Africa later. There is a fine line here between welcoming a rich foreign merchant or a skilled artisan from elsewhere and locking up the poor or kicking the lepers and Jews out of town. The Genoese welcomed what benefited them and set their faces against the rest, proving that in this they were the same as everyone else.
Gabriella Airaldi, the most recent student of the history of her town, is responsible for my overarching view that it is the Genoese, and not just Genoa, who provide the focus of my book, as they did hers.[7] Airaldi found eleven other themes worthy of notice. The Genoese constantly expanded their sphere of activity in this period, from the Ligurian and Tyrrhenian seas eventually throughout the Mediterranean and beyond to Peking and the Caribbean. Airaldi too thought that secrecy was a leitmotiv of Genoese history, and I have concluded that it played a distinctive role in the style of Genoese capitalism.[8] Being a traveling people, the Genoese were concerned about moving freely across land and sea—another reason to love liberty. Like the wind, the Genoese were an inconstant people, and for better or worse we can compare this trait to the myth of their perpetual rivals, the serene Venetians.[9] The diverse nature and structure of Genoa's exotic Mediterranean Empire reflect this inconstancy. The Genoese tended, in Airaldi's view, to monopolize opportunities—more clannishness here? There were never many Genoese, and their numerical inferiority with respect to the other great cities of Europe challenged the city's political and economic status. The fifteenth-century experiment of the Casa di San Giorgio, a great public bank that held as its capital the funded debt of the republic, is a landmark in the fiscal history of Europe. Januensis ergo mercator (Genoese therefore a merchant), this medieval saying highlights Airaldi's ninth theme that a mercantile culture permeated Genoa. Because Genoa was usually a republic, the balance of forces in the town, the roles played by clan, faction, and class, stand in sharp contrast to rural and monarchic Europe. Lastly, Airaldi saw the history of the Genoese as a major part of the history of the Mediterranean and all that entails in the world Fernand Braudel made. The entire sea was a home to the Genoese, and in their most intrepid period they could be found everywhere from the Crimea to Cadiz.
