Genoa has always been difficult to read from the outside. Squeezed between the mountains and the Ligurian Sea on a narrow coastal strip, its character was formed less by the Italian peninsula behind it than by the Mediterranean in front. For centuries, it looked outward. Early modern visitors called it il porto del mondo [the port of the world], and the Latin inscription on the twelfth-century Porta Soprana, the city’s surviving medieval gate, still welcomes those who come in peace and warns off those who come for war. Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374), passing through in 1358 on his way to the Holy Land, noted the collision of mountains and water, sea grandeur pressed against confinement, and gave the city the epithet that stuck: la Superba [the Superb]. It was during its golden age as banker to the Spanish crown in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the name came to mean what most people associate with it. Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), who visited on several occasions between 1600 and 1607 as court painter to the Duke of Mantua, was so struck by the palaces of the Strada Nuova that he published a folio of architectural drawings in Antwerp in 1622, Palazzi di Genova, explicitly proposing the Genoese model as worthy of imitation across northern Europe. Rubens was captivated by a city whose ruling families housed visiting dignitaries in their private residences by lot, drawn from official civic registers called the Rolli, and whose bankers held the finances of the Spanish empire. In Bruges, the old Genoese consular lodge still stands. In Rome, the port district of Ripa Grande was controlled by Genoese merchants, and the Trastevere was populated by Ligurian sailors. A recent exhibition at Genoa’s medieval hospital, the Commenda di Prè, took as its title Nessuno si sente straniero a Genova [No One Feels a Stranger in Genoa]. The phrase captures something real about a place whose prosperity depended on welcoming people and goods from everywhere, and whose pragmatism about human behaviour was correspondingly broad.
That pragmatism extended to matters the Republic’s rivals preferred to handle with more hypocrisy. Via della Maddalena runs as an inner parallel to Via Garibaldi, the street Rubens had drawn. The proximity is almost satirical. Behind the marble facades and frescoed saloni [reception halls] of the aristocracy, the quarter that gave the Maddalena church its name was the principal site of Genoa’s sex trade, a trade inseparable from the port economy. Genoa was a city of sailors, camalli [dockworkers], and transient foreign merchants. The Republic’s administration handled the matter with the unsentimental bookkeeping instinct for which the Genoese were known throughout Europe. Prostitution was not a marginal activity tolerated in the shadows; it was a regulated civic function, outsourced by contract every five years and treated as a source of public revenue. Registered courtesans paid a daily tax of five genovini [Genoese coins] to the treasury. They did not work on Saturdays. Sumptuary laws made their status visible: they were required to wear yellow, a colour that across Italian city-states served as a mark of social exclusion (it was also imposed on Jewish communities in medieval Europe). Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the designated area of their trade was formally circumscribed within the caruggi [narrow alleys] close to the harbour, bounded by what were effectively zoning borders, the locations of which are still marked in the modern city by speed bumps where gates once stood.
The church of Santa Maria Maddalena sat at the centre of this arrangement, and its role in the community’s life was anything but incidental. It was the institutional hinge between the regulated commerce of the flesh and the spiritual obligations that the Republic imposed on those who practised it. Registered courtesans were required to attend Sunday Mass here, the Magdalene being their assigned patron saint, a figure whose biblical narrative of repentance the authorities evidently considered instructive. On the feast of Saint John the Baptist, 24 June, the city’s patron day, the women were further obliged to walk in public religious procession through the caruggi, following behind the image of the Magdalene. This was a public ritual of incorporation and exclusion performed simultaneously: the courtesans were part of the civic body enough to be taxed, regulated, and paraded, but marked out by dress and procession as a class apart. Was this humiliation dressed as devotion, or devotion dressed as social control? What mattered was that the arrangement functioned. The courtesans attended Mass alongside the families, dockworkers, and merchants who made up the rest of the parish. Their contributions helped finance the church itself, and local tradition holds, plausibly if unverifiably, that much of the gilded interior was paid for by the clients of the surrounding streets, purchasing spiritual insurance with the profits of the trade. The Maddalena was, in practice, the parish church of an entire neighbourhood whose economic and moral life were openly entangled in ways that the Republic’s officials regulated but never pretended did not exist. The folk memory of those Sunday processions persisted long after the Republic fell, entering Italian popular song and literature.
A chapel on the site is documented from around 1150, positioned along the old Roman road that ran through this part of the city. In 1480, it was made a commenda [a church placed under the governance of a monastic or knightly order]. By 1572, it had been elevated to parish status and assigned to the Theatine fathers, who did not stay long, moving within a few years to a larger basilica. In 1576, Pope Gregory XIII (r. 1572–1585) transferred the church to the Somaschi fathers, the order founded by the Venetian soldier-turned-humanitarian Gerolamo Emiliani (1486–1537). The choice was pointed, even if the historical record does not spell out the reasoning. Emiliani, canonised in 1767 and declared patron saint of orphans by Pope Pius XI in 1928, had spent his life after his conversion caring for abandoned children and the destitute across the cities of northern Italy, establishing orphanages at Brescia, Bergamo, Como, and Milan. At Bergamo, he had also founded a hostel specifically for repentant prostitutes. His order, formally approved by Pope Paul III in 1540 and constituted as the Ordo Clericorum Regularium a Somascha [Order of Clerics Regular of Somasca] by Pius V in 1568, was defined by its work at the intersection of poverty, abandonment, and the sex trade. That such an order was given charge of a parish surrounded by active brothels was not coincidence but Counter-Reformation strategy: embedding charitable care precisely where it was most needed, placing priests experienced in the consequences of the flesh trade at the heart of the district that generated those consequences. The Somaschi established one of their three Italian novitiates in Genoa. At the Maddalena, their work was both pastoral and practical. They baptised the children of the quarter, including children whose parentage the parish registers may have recorded with some discretion. They heard confessions from the women of the surrounding streets, from the sailors who were their clients, and from the families who lived among both. In a neighbourhood where the boundaries between respectable and disreputable were a matter of a few metres, the Somaschi served as the common institution through which the entire population, however the rest of the city regarded them, participated in the sacramental life of the Church.
The Somaschi began rebuilding, commissioning Andrea Ceresola (active c.1580–c.1619), known as il Vannone, the Lombard-born architect who simultaneously held the title of architetto camerale [superintendent of public works] for the Republic. Ceresola, who was also redesigning the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa and building the extraordinary raised church of San Pietro in Banchi nearby (a building constructed above commercial premises, its construction financed by the sale of shops beneath the nave, a marriage of the sacred and the mercantile that could only have been conceived in Genoa), signed the contract for the Maddalena in 1585. He reoriented the building to improve access from the Strada Nuova and completed the main body by around 1587, producing a single-nave church. In 1635, a substantial renovation transformed the interior, introducing twin columns to divide the nave into three sections and raising a high dome over the transept crossing. The current structure was essentially complete by 1661.
Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the church accumulated an unusually rich decorative programme for a building of its size. Sebastiano Galeotti (1656–1746), a Florentine painter who worked extensively across northern Italy and was also active in the nearby Palazzo Spinola, frescoed the dome, nave, presbytery, and apse in 1729, including a Gloria di Santa Maria Maddalena above the congregation. Sigismondo Betti (1700–1783) painted the transept frescoes in 1737, depicting scenes from the life of Gerolamo Emiliani, the order’s founder, whose mission to orphans and repentant women was thus given visual form directly above the parish he had been sent, in effect, to serve. Giovanni Battista Parodi (1674–1730), his brother Domenico Parodi (1672–1742), and Paolo Gerolamo Piola (1666–1724) all contributed works, as did Giovanni Battista Casone (1655–1728), Giuseppe Palmieri (1674–1740), and Giacomo Antonio Boni (1688–1766). Domenico Parodi provided frescoes of the Marriage and Nativity of the Virgin and the Assumption, while Palmieri and Boni worked on Trinity and Angels and Passion subjects. The cumulative effect is striking for so compact a church: a Baroque interior thick with gilded stucco and painted ceilings, all of it enclosed in a building embedded in an alley network that, even in broad daylight, carries the atmosphere of a world that has never quite submitted to respectability.
The Maddalena quarter remains what it has been for centuries. The caruggi around Via della Maddalena still carry, alongside the art galleries, focaccerie [flatbread bakeries], and edicole votive [devotional wall shrines] set into the walls between buildings, the visible presence of sex workers, many of them now from communities far beyond Liguria. Genoa was absorbed into the Kingdom of Sardinia by the Congress of Vienna in 1815, against the wishes of its population, and folded into the unified Italian state in 1861, but it has never quite belonged to the nation that claimed it. Its dialect, its mercantile instincts, its refusal of the pastoral Italian idyll in favour of port grit and mountain claustrophobia: all of this persists. The church of the Maddalena sits in the middle of that persistence, its Somaschi fathers still in residence after four and a half centuries, still tending a parish whose boundaries encompass exactly the same contradictions that Gerolamo Emiliani’s order was sent here to address. The Magdalene’s tears, in Genoa, have always fallen on complicated ground.
References
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Howie, E. (2024) ‘Sumptuary Laws, Gender, and Public Dressing in Early Modern Genoa’, The Historical Journal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Available at: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/historical-journal/article/sumptuary-laws-gender-and-public-dressing-in-early-modern-genoa/99F01BDBC1BF7BE5DEBEFB72A09F076E (Accessed: 1 October 2024).
Poleggi, E. and Motta, T. (2009) Genoa: The Strade Nuove and the System of the Palazzi dei Rolli. Genoa: Sagep
Stevens Crawshaw, J.L. (2019) Cleaning Up Renaissance Italy: Environmental Ideals and Urban Practice in Genoa and Venice. Oxford: Oxford University Press
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Whitfield, P. (2020) Historic Churches of Genoa: A Brief Guide. Genoa: Peter Whitfield