Genoa never tried to be pretty in the way Florence or Venice did. It tried to be rich, and succeeded, and the Strade Nuove, the new streets laid out in the sixteenth century, are the proof. The city's banking families, who financed the Spanish crown for decades, built palaces along Via Garibaldi, Via Balbi and Via Cairoli, and they did it on a steep, crowded slope where there was no room for gardens, so the grandeur is stacked into courtyards, loggias and monumental staircases. The palaces were registered in the Rolli, official lists that told the republic which houses should host visiting kings and cardinals, a bit like a medieval hotel guide for diplomats. UNESCO listed the system in 2006.
Three palaces on Via Garibaldi are museums, including the Palazzo Rosso and Palazzo Bianco, and Palazzo Tursi holds the violin of Paganini, a Genoese, which the city keeps as a treasure. Even if you skip the art, wander in through the open doors to look at a courtyard, because the best of Genoa is often behind a heavy door.
Genoa is a hard city for motorcycles in one way and a good one in another. The old centre is a maze of alleys called caruggi, closed to cars and often to bikes, but scooters and motorcycles are everywhere in the rest of town and parking is easier than for a car. Fuel is plentiful in the city of nearly six hundred thousand, and the Val Polcevera suburbs like Manesseno on the western side have pumps and cafes too. Traffic around the port and the elevated roads is heavy, with tunnels, merging lanes and aggressive timing, so treat it as an urban ride and keep your eyes up.
Leave early to get the better roads. Behind the city, the hills of the Apennines come close, and the old road over the Bocchetta pass above the Polcevera valley gives you proper bends after the stop-start of town. Eat focaccia for breakfast, farinata at lunch, and trofie with pesto in the evening, because pesto is Genoese and nowhere else does it better. Spring and autumn are best, when the light on the old stone is soft and the crowds are smaller.