La Superba's medieval bank still anchors Europe's busiest Mediterranean port
Liguria's capital remains Italy's busiest harbour and the Mediterranean's busiest, twelfth in the European Union. For more than seven centuries Genoa headed a maritime republic; Petrarch dubbed it la Superba for sea glory and landmarks. The Bank of Saint George, opened in 1407, is the oldest known state deposit bank.
People have lived here since the fifth or fourth millennium BC. A Ligurian oppidum on Castello hill allied with Rome in the Second Punic War, was destroyed by Carthage in 209 BC, then rebuilt with municipal rights after 146 BC. Name theories run from Latin knee for the coastal bend, Janus the two-faced door god, ianua meaning passage, or Etruscan Kainua, new city—each trying to explain Genoa's gate-like seat on the Gulf of Genoa.
Crusade fleets from a town of about ten thousand helped at Antioch and Jerusalem; Embriaco's crossbowmen fought in 1099. Treaties later opened Byzantine, Levantine, and Egyptian trade. After Venice gained from the Fourth Crusade, Genoa backed Michael VIII Palaiologos; Constantinople fell back to Nicaea on 25 July 1261 and Genoese stations spread to Chios, Lesbos, Smyrna, and Crimean Caffa. Fourteenth-century sailors wore durable blue fustian—early jeans—and Corsica was annexed in 1347.
Christopher Columbus was born here around 1451 and pledged a tenth of New World income to Saint George for tax relief. Fernand Braudel labeled 1557–1627 the age of the Genoese for quiet credit to Spain's Habsburg machine. Decline followed: plague killed up to half the city in 1656–57, Tabarka fell in 1742, and the republic ended in 1797. UNESCO listed the Strade Nuove and Palazzi dei Rolli in 2006; some 566,247 residents lived inside city limits as of 2026, with more than 1.5 million along the wider Riviera metro.
Source: Genoa
