The train to Genova Piazza Principe
by Julian Stannard
Having graduated in Medieval English Literature from the University of Exeter in 1984 (I was twenty-two at the time) I have to admit no great plan presented itself. I knew I wanted to escape Thatcher’s Britain and someone had told me that if I fetched up in Italy before the start of the academic year I might land a job teaching English.
I caught a train to Milan and spent a month looking for employment. Scraps of work came my way but the Italian couple with whom I was staying argued so loudly and so frequently I realised it was time to move on. I took a train to Genoa. I got off at Principe and walked down Via Balbi unaware I was going to spend a great many years teaching in that very part of town. Sometime later a chance encounter with a professor of English resulted in a job. My university career had begun.
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I shared a flat with an Iranian in the Sottoripa, a rather notorious area which ran along the port). I was living in the centro storico – the old quarter – the largest extant mediaeval settlement in Europe. Dickens describes Genoa in Pictures from Italy (1846). He marvels at both the grandeur and the squalor of the place. Plus ça change. The sumptuous palaces in Via Garabaldi reflect Genoa’s former glory and yet some of the streets nearby are so narrow there’s only room for one person, single file, and a platoon of rats. Five minutes away from palatial grandeur you might well find yourself in Vico dell’ Amor Perfetto – the Street of Perfect Love – which is, unsurprisingly perhaps, the Red Light Area.
The University of Genoa didn’t make great demands on my time and the summer holidays were long. My monthly salary was a million lire and in those days eating out was cheap. And drinking out was cheap too.
For me the city on the sea has always been a gift: dilapidated, melancholic, phantasmagoric, mysterious and beautiful. I had written poetry at university and when I arrived in Genoa in 1984 I had with me an old fashioned typewriter. Clackety clack. Clackety clack.
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I discovered soon enough that Genoa, and Liguria in general, have a rich literary history. It seeps into the bones of the city and it seeps into the bones of the neighbouring towns. Although the list is far from exhaustive, Italian writers from the area include Eugenio Montale, Italo Calvino, Giorgio Caproni (one of my favourite poets), Dino Campana, Camillo Sbarbaro, Edoardo Sanguineti. English and American writers have long favoured Genoa and the Italian Riviera. We think of Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Dickens (mentioned above), Melville, Hawthorne, Henry James, DH Lawrence.
In Rapallo, Ezra Pound set up home and with it the so-called ‘Ezruversity’. In fact Rapallo became an international modernist hub which attracted, inter alia, the English poet Basil Bunting. Charles Tomlinson lived in Fiascherino in the 1950s. There have been several well-known French writers too, including Paul Valéry, who made Genoa his second home.
I have written about Genoa and Liguria for forty years. The port city – known as Zena in the local dialect – got under my skin and it stayed under my skin. In 2018 Canneto brought out a bilingual publication called Sottoripa: Genoese Poems. In 2024, much to my surprise, I was invited to Lerici where I was awarded the Shelley Prize for my contribution to Ligurian culture. It was a very happy day. It was a day I shall never forget.
Julian Stannard has published nine collections of poetry; the most recent being Please Don’t Bomb the Ghost of My Brother (Salt, 2023). His work has been nominated for Forward (UK) and Pushcart Prizes (USA). He has been awarded the International Troubadour Prize for Poetry and the Lerici Anglo-Italian Prize for Poetry. The American publisher Sagging Meniscus Press published a novel by Stannard in 2024.
Website: www.julianstannardauthor.com