Food History of Genoa

Key eras

1. The maritime republic, 11th century to 1797

   For more than seven centuries Genoa was the capital of a maritime republic and one of Europe's great trading powers, home from 1407 to the Bank of Saint George. Farinata appears in the written record in the 15th century, when a decree of the Republic regulated the oil used to make it, and a popular story sets its birth after the Genoese victory over Pisa at Meloria in 1284.

   Taste it todayFarinata

2. Candied fruit and confectioners, from 1780

   Pietro Romanengo fu Stefano began in 1780 with Antonio Maria Romanengo, a trader in spices and colonial goods born in Voltaggio, whose sons turned to candied fruit and sugared almonds. The first shop opened on Via Soziglia in 1814, a second on Via Roma in the 1930s, and in 1868 the house supplied candied fruit and confetti for the wedding of Prince Umberto and Margherita of Savoy.

3. The cookbooks that wrote pesto down, 1852 to 1863

   Basil in Genoese pesto is documented only from the 1850s. Emanuele Rossi's La vera cuciniera genovese of 1852 prints a pesto of garlic and basil, and Giovanni Battista Ratto's La cuciniera genovese of 1863, the first complete collection of Genoese cooking with 481 recipes, gave a pesto made with Dutch cheese, a sign of how much northern European cheese the port traded.

4. The Mercato Orientale, 1899

   The city council voted in 1893 to give the produce of the Val Bisagno a permanent market, which until then had been held on Piazza De Ferrari. The Mercato Orientale opened on 2 June 1899 in the cloister of the Augustinian convent of the Consolazione on Via XX Settembre, the first building in Genoa in Hennebique reinforced concrete. A food hall with bars and tasting counters opened on its raised floor on 7 May 2019.

5. Protected names, 2005 to today

   Basilico Genovese won protected designation of origin at the end of a process completed in October 2005, and its protection consortium was recognised in 2008; a basil park opened at Prà, in the city's west, in 2006. Focaccia di Recco col formaggio now carries IGP protection, and the Pesto World Championship brings competitors and their marble mortars to Palazzo Ducale every other spring.

   Taste it todayFocaccia di Recco col formaggio

Immigrant influences

Arab and Levantine trading partners

Chickpeas are widely held to have entered Genoese cooking through the medieval republic's trade with the Arab world, becoming the farinata and panissa still sold across the city's old town.

Sardinian shepherds

Pecorino sardo, or Fiore Sardo, is one of the cheeses in today's pesto genovese, an ingredient brought in from Sardinia, the kind of import Ligurian cooking absorbed over centuries of sea trade.

Portuguese and northern European merchants

Stockfish has been known in Liguria since the 17th century through trade with the Portuguese, and northern European cheese was common enough in the port that Ratto's 1863 pesto used Dutch cheese.

Signature innovations

• Pesto genovese, basil pounded with garlic, pine nuts, cheese and oil, first printed as pesto d'aglio e basilico by Emanuele Rossi in 1852
  Taste it todayPesto genovese
• Farinata, the chickpea and olive oil flatbread baked in wood ovens and regulated by a decree of the Republic in the 15th century
  Taste it todayFarinata
• Focaccia genovese (fugassa), brushed with oil, water and coarse salt before its last rise and dipped in cappuccino at breakfast
  Taste it todayFocaccia genovese
• Panissa, set chickpea batter served cold with oil and lemon or fried in strips as panissette
• Cima alla genovese, a stuffed breast of veal sewn shut and poached in broth
  Taste it todayCima alla genovese
• Cappon magro, the fast-day pyramid of seafood and vegetables built on garlic-rubbed ship's biscuit
• Salsa di noci, the walnut and garlic sauce made with prescinsêua curd
• Pandolce genovese, the Christmas sweet bread in its tall naturally leavened form and the low version of the late 1800s
  Taste it todayPandolce genovese
• Candied fruit and sugared almonds from Pietro Romanengo fu Stefano, confectioners since 1780