Wherever they go, they make another Genoa

At the turn of the fourteenth century, a poet whose name we do not know – the Genoese Anonym – filled a songbook with Genoese verse: moral and religious poems, scenes of city life, celebrations of the naval victories of “la Superba”.

His, too, is the earliest snapshot of the Genoese vocation for the wider world: “So many are the Genoese, and so scattered across the earth, that wherever they go or dwell, they make another Genoa.” Seven centuries before the Ligurian neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires and Gibraltar, the diaspora had already been written in verse.