Which great northern Italian port, headed by a doge, for many years dominated much of the Mediterranean with its fleet, traded with the gorgeous East, grew rich on its privileged relationship with the Byzantine empire and had a lion as its emblem? No, I’m not talking about Venice, but about its great rival, on the other side of Italy: Genoa the Superb.

In their day, the Genoese were no less enterprising, or ruthless, than the Venetians. The two cities were so similar — in elegance, vanity and greed — that they could hardly fail to be at each other’s throats. Venice was founded by refugees from Attila the Hun; Genoa by fugitives from Saracen corsairs who raided ill-defended Ligurian towns for victims to go on sale in the slave markets of Tunis and Algiers. The Venetians took to their islands; the Genoese to their heights, around which they soon built beefy fortifications to fend off their neighbours and sworn enemies, the Pisans.

The first doge-for-life, appointed in 1339, was Simon Boccanegra, who is also sometimes romantically described as a corsair, but a Christian one. Boccanegra was not the first Genoese admiral to make his city feared. At the peak of their potency, the Genoese smashed the Venetians at the Battle of Curzola in 1298, taking many prisoners, including Marco Polo. He was renowned for going east; Genoa’s most famous traveller went west.

Christopher Columbus’s memorial dignifies the seafront from which he didn’t sail to discover America. He actually set off from Palos, in western Spain, but his native city eventually prospered on trade with America, while the Serenissima became art history. Even in decline, however, Venetian elegance made the Piazza San Marco “the drawing room of Europe”. Genoa was always more like its central bank.

IN THE 1960s — before the Autostrada del Sole allowed motorists pretty well to bypass the city — you had to drive through the jam-packed docks on the way north and south. It could take hours to nudge through the clotted cars, lorries and quayside trains. Fuming frustration left little appetite for exploring the city.

Now things are different: you can dive off the autostrada and onto the elevato that swings you round to the upper city. Private cars are banned from all but a few main arteries, so, if you’re wise, you forget wheels and rely on your feet. Genoa is big, but not that big: the old city is high, and wide, but we walked from end to end each leisurely morning.

Why go to Genoa before Venice, Milan, Rome, Naples, Siena, Florence or even San Gimignano, Pisa or Lucca? There’s no convincing answer. No unmissable art decks its halls, though Anthony van Dyck and Peter Paul Rubens left good work there. But the second rank has its charms: for instance, Genoa’s black-and-white “French Gothic” 12th-century cathedral, San Lorenzo. Built by the masons who worked in Chartres and Rouen, the cathedral was an early symptom of Genoa’s affinity with France.

Seven centuries later, infatuated with the seemingly invincible Napoleon, Genoa proclaimed itself part of France. Bonaparte — who was born in Corsica, which had recently been a Genoese possession — promised graciously never to enrol the citizens as soldiers, only as sailors. After the Grande Armée was cut to pieces in Russia, he broke his word. Shortly afterwards, the Genoese broke with him.

The next state they joined was Savoy, in 1824. Its capital was Turin, but its king was glad of a place on the sea. The Palazzo Reale, at the north end of the city’s shoreline, is adjacent to the Via Balbi, which, during Genoa’s flashiest days in the 1600s, took the overspill from the Strada Nuova. On what became known as the Strada Novissima, the newest rich built their showplaces. Old money remained further up the hill. It had funded the Hapsburgs and the emperor Charles V.

PILED HIGH around its bay, Genoa is an architectural club sandwich.

On the bottom level, the docks have been jazzed into user-friendliness. The brochure promises “the biggest marine park in Europe, a shopping centre and plenty of fish restaurants ... The Galata area will house an authentic reconstruction of a 17th-century Genoese galley”.

What the galley is guaranteed not to contain is a crew living in the conditions of the so-called Turks, the galley slaves of Genoa’s Golden Age. Often prisoners of war, they supplied the fuel for most of the fleet. In his Storie di Genova, Michelangelo Dolcino tells it as it was: horrible. Muslim slaves were chained to their benches night and day. They rowed by raising themselves to their feet and falling backwards to work their oars. The only respite came when the wind was strong enough to propel the ship.

As you climb up from Via Balbi, you are in a web of narrow lanes in which you can buy pizza in any of dozens of snack bars. Folding it in two, you can loiter upwards past the pinched botteghe that sell home-made paper and toys, wine, oil (the best extra virgin in Italy comes from the region) and gilded antiques. It’s not hard to imagine the scurrying, cloaked figures of the grand age of La Superba, engaged in the dirty business of the ruling families — Spinolas, Grimaldis and Lomenellis — who were often literally at daggers drawn.

Times recommends

• Checking into ‘Europe’s dirtiest hotel’
• The best out of season European breaks
• Smugshots special: wintersports