There is in Italy a great city by the sea that I have lately come to love. Its name is Genoa.

For centuries it was common ground among foreign visitors to Italy that Genoa was like nowhere else and should not be missed. From the English diarist John Evelyn in 1644 to Herman Melville in 1857, Mark Twain in 1869, Henry James in 1877, Anton Chekhov in the 1880's and Dylan Thomas in 1947, all were agreed.
Yet, unlike its sisters on the Mediterranean--Naples, Barcelona and Marseilles--Genoa, a city of about 710,000 people,has not had a high profile among foreign visitors.

It is, by contrast, quietly addictive. It has never been marketed.* The postcard industry would seem to have taken one look at the famously elusive city and gone away in despair.