Genoa's past sits in layers you can touch: a Roman hill fort under a Dominican church, the tower-houses of crusade captains, a hillside necropolis of marble mourners. Three days tracing La Superba from 1099 to the emigrant ships.
Consecrated 1118 and striped in black Promontorio slate and white Carrara marble. A British naval shell that pierced the nave on 9 February 1941 never exploded and still stands inside. The treasury below guards the Sacro Catino.
Raised in the 1130s on the hill where the Roman castrum stood, reusing ancient columns. The Dominicans added three cloisters and a 1451 Annunciation fresco by Giusto di Ravensburg, the earliest Flemish-style painting in Liguria.
A deconsecrated Augustinian church of 1260 and its rare triangular cloister, now Genoa's museum of stone sculpture. The core is Giovanni Pisano's shattered 1312 tomb of Margaret of Brabant, carved for Henry VII's queen who died here.
The 41-metre tower of Guglielmo Embriaco, the shipwright whose siege engines cracked Jerusalem's walls in 1099. His family won exemption when a 1296 decree cut all private towers to 24 metres, which is why it alone still stands tall.
Opened 1851 and spread over 33 hillside hectares, it is Europe's great open-air sculpture gallery. Realist marbles such as Monteverde's Angel stand near Giuseppe Mazzini's crypt and the grave of Constance Lloyd, Oscar Wilde's wife.
Built 1893-1895, this stone arch vaults over the boulevard that engineers drove through the medieval quarter from 1892, demolishing whole blocks. Its porticoes and early-1900s mosaic vaults record Genoa's belle-époque rebuilding.
Giuseppe Mazzini was born at Via Lomellini 11 in 1805, and the house keeps his study, letters and death mask alongside the flag of the 1849 Roman Republic and relics of the Thousand who sailed from Quarto in May 1860.
The 77-metre tower was rebuilt in 1543 after Louis XII's French fortress on the rock was razed, making it the world's oldest working lighthouse still in use. Its beam has guided ships into the harbour for nearly five centuries.
A 1180 Knights Hospitaller hospice that lodged crusaders bound for the Holy Land now holds the National Museum of Italian Emigration, telling the story of 26 million departures through passports, ship tickets and recorded voices.
Jews were confined to the alleys above Piazza dei Tessitori by decree in 1660, in the tallest, darkest block of the old town. A few steps west, Via del Campo 29 rosso, the record shop that launched Fabrizio De André, keeps the street's dockside ballads alive.
Captain Enrico Alberto d'Albertis raised this neo-Gothic castle on a bastion of the 17th-century Mura Nuove in 1892 and filled it with masks, weapons and instruments gathered on three circumnavigations under sail.
A fishing hamlet of ochre and pink houses absorbed by the growing city in 1926, where boats are still hauled by hand onto the pebble cove. Genoese families have walked the shore promenade here on the evening passeggiata since the 1800s.