Porta Soprana and Columbus's House

Why it matters

This is the gate every traveller from Rome and the east came through, standing at the top of the rise where the ground was highest — its old name, Superana, means exactly that. For a walled city on a hillside, this was the front door.

The walls it belonged to went up in a hurry. Genoa built a new circuit between 1155 and 1159 because the emperor Frederick Barbarossa was expected, and the chronicler Caffaro records the work being finished in fifty-three days by the whole population. They are still called the Barbarossa walls.

Very little of that circuit survives. Porta Soprana and the Porta dei Vacca, down by the harbour, are the two gates left, which is why the towers here carry more weight than their size suggests.

The gate also marks a boundary that still works. Above it the ground rises to the nineteenth-century streets and the hills; below it the lanes fall away into the medieval town. Walking through the arch, the change from one kind of city to the other happens in about ten paces.

What you actually see

The gate is two round towers flanking a tall pointed arch, in pale stone, with battlements above. It looks more medieval than it is: what stands today is the result of a restoration between 1882 and 1914 by Alfredo D'Andrade, who rebuilt the towers to the form he believed they had in the twelfth century.

Inside the arch, two Latin inscriptions in leonine verse run along the walls. They boast of the city's victories in the Mediterranean, warn enemies away, and end by naming the consuls holding office in 1155 — a piece of public record-keeping carved where every traveller would pass it.

The towers can be climbed. Stairs and small rooms inside lead to openings looking along the line the wall once took, down over the roofs and out toward the port.

Below the gate, on a lawn, stands a compact stone house with an arched ground floor. Tradition gives it to the Columbus family, and documents place Christopher Columbus, born in 1451, living on this site roughly between 1455 and 1470. The building itself is an eighteenth-century rebuilding on the old footings — the original is thought to have been destroyed in the French bombardment of 1684.

Beside it stands the cloister of Sant'Andrea, a twelfth-century arcade from a convent that was demolished when this quarter was cleared; the columns were taken down, stored and re-erected here in the twentieth century, which is why a cloister sits in a garden with no church attached.

The stone is worth looking at closely. The towers are faced in squared blocks with thin courses of brick at the openings, and the arch between them is pointed, not round — early Gothic, built at a moment when the city was spending everything it had on defence.

From the terrace outside the towers you can see how steeply the land drops to the port, which explains the whole shape of Genoa: a wall on the ridge, the town packed below it, and the sea at the bottom.

The garden around the house was made in the nineteen-thirties, when the quarter between the gate and the sea was cleared for the new Via Dante and its office blocks. That clearance destroyed a dense medieval district; the lawn, the house and the re-erected cloister are what was kept from it, which is why they sit in the open with modern buildings behind them.

How to visit

Half an hour for the gate, the house and the cloister together; the garden invites longer.

The house is a very small museum — two rooms and a multimedia presentation — and it is honest about what is and is not original. Treat it as a monument rather than a collection.

The gate stands at the top of a rise, so approach it from Piazza De Ferrari and walk down afterwards rather than up. The steps down toward the old town come out near the cathedral.

The towers are visited on a short route with stairs and low doorways, and they are not suitable for anyone unsteady on steps. The garden, the house and the cloister are all at ground level.

Early evening is the best hour here: the gate faces west, so the towers take the light and the garden below fills with people from the offices nearby.

Honest notes

The towers as they stand are a nineteenth-century idea of a twelfth-century gate. That does not make them fake — the fabric is largely old — but the crenellations and the tidy profile are D'Andrade's.

The Columbus house is a reconstruction, not the navigator's actual home, and the site is the only certain part. The city says so on the panels; some tour guides do not.

The traffic road passes right beside the gate, so the noise is constant; the garden below is quieter than the arch itself.

The cloister is an assembled monument, moved here from elsewhere. It is genuinely medieval stone in a twentieth-century arrangement, and the panels say as much.