We walk into La Medina, the spice shop on Via San Luca in Genoa and I greet Sabri, the owner. “Salaam, sadiqi. It is so good to see you again.” He steps around the counter and hugs me and says, “It is good to see you, as well. This is your shop.” I tell him he should be careful in telling me that, because I might take something and walk out with it. “That would be appropriate, as it is your shop,” he says, with all earnestness.

It is easy to say how different certain places are from your home town when you’re traveling abroad. We’ve all heard how familiarity breeds contempt. I don’t agree. Only through familiarity can you come to love something more deeply. Whether that is your home, your town, your friends and family and shopkeepers you meet abroad.

That love for what you discover is the driver for sharing those discoveries with your family, your neighbors, your community. Its how best practices spread. Why certain building techniques became so widespread 2000 years ago. It is why people travel to places they’ve never seen but heard of from a trusted friend. Why cities share their successes with others who want to become better versions of themselves. Italians cook with tomatoes that are native to South America. We can all learn.

The buildings, magnificent palaces, churches, fountains, statues you see in old cities weren’t built for their own ends. They were built by man for man. While they are objectively beautiful, good and true, they were made so by human hands, for human everyday life and enjoyment. You come to understand that a city that gives its residents mosaic to walk on under beautiful colonnades does so because it fundamentally understands that its people are created with inherent dignity and are made for greatness, not mere drudgery. Once you understand that, your gaze moves from the beauty of the created object to the object of that creation, and that is when you really come to know the city and want to share what you’ve come to know. Through its people.

Sabri is once such person. A Palestinian spice merchant who owns a humble shop on a busy walking street. He sells spices, to include two homemade curry blends, one roasted. He sells 50 different teas and talks to you with the knowledge and intensity of a pharmacist when he teases out exactly what your purpose is for the tea you’re asking about. He can tell you where his multiple varieties of almonds come from as well as which orchards in Sicily produce his dried fruits. Because he knows them personally.

You can only come to know this by entering his shop and speaking to him at a level slightly deeper than the superficial tourist, afraid, for whatever reason, or uninterested to inquire about the person behind the business. They marvel at the original Roman era columns and arches in his ground floor shop. They don’t consider that those columns and arches were made to support the building for people to live and work in. It was made by man for man. You can get to know that man.

While some few travelers do walk past the treasures right in front of them to match the photo they saw on Instagram, many more are finding treasures, not in individual objects in museums, but in paying attention to the 5th Century columns and arches in ground floor shops in an old city center. And many more are finding these treasures in small groups, on intimate curated tours.

I had the high privilege to co-lead two such groups with my friend, Alan Cornett, host of the Cultural Debris Podcast, and lover of “Permanent Things,” to Genoa in October 2022. We had taken our inspiration from Danielle Oteri, of Feast Travel, and Mountain Butorac, The Catholic Traveler, who regularly lead tours in Southern Italy and Rome/The Holy Land, respectively. We knew from Danielle and Mountain that putting together curated tours was far more difficult than most people would think. They were right, but it was worth the work!

Our desire was to offer a unique experience of searching for, pondering and discussing the Cultural Debris of the city. Our challenge to the guests every day was to look for and find interesting things they wouldn’t necessarily have seen if they weren’t really actively looking. We hoped that the guests would form friendships and want to return both on their own and with us to future destinations. We also hoped they would take the best of what they observed and spread that word to deliberately make their own places into something even better.

It was certainly the case for us that the whole truly was greater than the sum of the parts. The more people actively looked for Cultural Debris, and pointed it out to each other, the more people saw and the more the city opened itself to the group. The guest accommodations, a B&B in a former family palace built in 1400, which is still owned by the original family, made everyone feel like they were truly part of the city rather than how you’d feel if staying in a hotel.

Every day we had a general theme for the day, and a general plan for an activity. We started each day with a communal breakfast around our large kitchen table with scrumptious meals made by our hostesses, Elena and Fanny. Each day was a new, beautiful, not just tasty breakfast. The care with which they arranged the table every day demonstrated a level of care beyond commercial transactions. It demonstrated understanding of the transcendence of beauty and love, genuine love, for their guests. Almost like phantoms, there, but nearly unseen, they ensured the group was not merely satisfied, but happy, all the while gently nudging the group to look inward and not even notice them. It allowed the group to talk about the day’s topic and be fortified to go exploring.

That level of care and desire for their guests to have a rich experience drew us like magnets to ask about Elena and Fanny themselves. Once you learn about their families, how they came to meet each other and become friends and go into business, you see their personal touches in all the rooms. Suddenly the frescoes on the ceiling of the apartment seem brighter because you know about the individual souls who make that place available for you to appreciate. Made by people for people.

Genoa has the largest ancient city center in Europe. The narrow streets and tall buildings spill down the steep hillsides and wind around on levels, like contour lines on a map. One level up the hill from Sabri’s shop on the Via San Luca is the Via Cairoli, which becomes the Via Garibaldi and its Renaissance era palaces of Genoa’s patrician families. On the Via Cairoli, a few steps from the B&B our guests stay is Profumo di Rosa, the delightful gelateria which has a delightful name (scent/taste of a Rose) owned and operated by the even more delightful Rosa. “Do you know what flavor all the tourists ask me for every day? Fraaaaagola (strawberry),” she tells us in nearly unaccented English. “You know what we don’t have? Fragola. You know why? Because it is out of season and I will not use frozen strawberries in my gelato and I will not use strawberries flown in from across the ocean. Only local. Only in season.”

Rosa is a remarkable woman. Truly. The week before she spoke to our Excursion guests she was in Manchester, England, leading an international workshop on making gelato. She takes her job seriously and she understands that in offering only seasonal ingredients from regional farms, local terrace gardens, and her dad’s garden and orchard, she limits her availability compared to other shops. But more importantly, she makes the best gelato you can find anywhere. And both Rosa and her assistant, Valentina, as much as the gelato itself, bring people back. Listening to her take orders in multiple languages shows her level of care. This person, you come to realize, has a shop in a beautiful building on a beautiful cobblestone street. But it is the person herself that makes the visit memorable, one that you want to return for. And one which business owners the world over can learn from to make their own towns better.

Between Sabri’s and Rosa’s shops stands the Basilica San Siro, named for the 5th century Saint Cyrus, who was bishop of Genoa, but more importantly banished a basilisk from the well adjacent to the modern basilica. Stuff of legends, basilisks. “Couldn’t have happened,” says the modern intellectual. “No such thing as a basilisk. Poppyckock! Probably some snake fell into a well and this guy fished it out and cleaned out the well for the people.”

But do people ever make a saint out of someone who does the expected, the mundane? GK Chesterton said, “A legend is about something; it is not started by a word, but by some true or false event.” In another book, Chesterton writes:

“When some critic or other chose to say that Prior’s Park was not a priory, but was named after some quite modern man named Prior, nobody really tested the theory at all. It never occurred to anybody repeating the story to ask if there <was> any Mr. Prior, if anybody had ever seen him or heard of him. As a matter of fact, it was a priory, and shared the fate of most priories; that is, the Tudor gentleman with the plumes simply stole it by brute force and turned it into his own private house; he did worse things, as you shall hear. But the point here is that this is how the trick works; and the trick works in the same way in the other part of the tale. The name of this district is printed Holinwall in all the best maps produced by the scholars, and they allude lightly, not without a smile, to the fact that it was pronounced Holiwell by the most ignorant and old-fashioned of the poor. But it is spelt wrong and pronounced right.”

“Do you mean to say,” asked Crane quickly, “that there really was a well?”

“There is a well,” said Fisher, “and the truth lies at the bottom of it.”

So in the case of St Cyrus, I think it more likely than not that there was a basilisk at the well and that he really did banish it. Across from the apartment in which we hosted our meals and cocktails, there is a small marble relief plaque above the spot of the ancient well showing San Siro banishing the basilisk. Nobody will make a saint out of a guy, build a big basilica named after the guy, and put up a marble relief of him banishing the basilisk if he didn’t banish a basilisk. That is what Russell Kirk would have argued. “The resources of history are embedded within concrete places and customs, and supplement the individual’s own private stock of reason to provide a framework for decision.” History and modern geology tells us there was well. History tells us of the bishop San Siro. I think there was also a basilisk.

So why should anyone care about whether or not there was a basilisk? Why not just go inside and look at the magnificent church itself? Isn’t it sufficient to just marvel at beauty and who cares about some bishop 1500 years ago? No way. Without that bishop, there’d be no church to admire today.

Like the ancient buildings and cobblestone streets, the churches of Genoa are difficult to describe with words. Words are not sufficient to convey the beauty and grandeur. Unlike the buildings that man built for man to live and work in, Genoa’s churches were built by man to lift men’s hearts and minds above men to God. Only people who believed that Cyrus, through the power of God, performed a miracle, would spend decades to build a church like San Siro.

One such neighbor is Matteo, whose family owns and runs a polleria, or poultry shop, since 1900. The lines outside the polleria are long and patient, and form at the shop’s opening every morning. Inside the shop is a sea of calm, but deliberate movement by Matteo’s mother, father, brother, wife and children. All wearing a common plaid apron cut to look like a fine Italian vest, all wearing a smile and a halo of love. Matteo asks me what I’m planning to cook for dinner with the chicken leg quarters his father is de-boning. We talk about our Excursion, families, architecture and Genovese history. On the way back to the San Siro apartment, you stumble upon the Chiesa della Madallena, the Church of the Magdalene, one of those beautiful – Americans would call grand – churches that sits humbly empty most of the day, known largely only to its neighbors. And they’re fine with that.

In the old city center of Genoa, there are multiple magnificent churches that can be visited all in a day with a map and firm resolution of a sightseer. You can do that, and you’d never get to meet St Cyrus and learn who he was. Santa Maria delle Vigne (St Mary of the Vineyard) is a wonderful church almost wholly missed. Like San Ignazio in Rome, its ceiling is so grand there’s a large magnifying mirror on the floor to give visitors a better look. But few come to see. Not because they wouldn’t want to, but because most aren’t aware. There are so many pretty churches on the main streets that to walk off the beaten path, even to see something this magnificent becomes a chore. Oh, the riches of churches and beauty.

Giving San Siro a run for its money in the beauty department are two breathtaking (as in, they take your breath away) churches on opposite ends of the ancient city center. The Basilica of the Annunciation was hit twice in World War II by British naval gunfire and destroyed. The Genovese had choices. They could have torn it down and built apartments. They could have torn it down and built a modern church building. They could have left it as a monument. But they made a deliberate decision to rebuild it to its former grandeur. It has taken 75 years and the ceiling frescoes are still not quite complete.

It does cheer the heart to see a local people turn to their forebears and decide that what was there was already transcendentally good instead of trying to do different. da Vinci’s last supper may be the best known, but Giulio Cesare Procaccini’s Last Supper above the main doors in the basilica is every bit as good. A “smaller” study (the size of da Vinci’s own painting) of the gigantic painting can be viewed up close in the Galleria Nazionale della Pallazo Spinola around the corner from San Siro.

On the other side of the city center, adjacent to the Instagram-ready fountain in the Piazza dei Ferrari, sits the Chiesa di Gesu.

Smaller than both Annunziata and San Siro, the Gesu is no less breathtaking. The difference, though, is the palpable sense of reverence. Tourists talk in other churches. Everyone is quiet in the Gesu. Perhaps it is because of the confessions being heard all day and the long line of penitents that can be found there every day. Perhaps it is the great frequency of Masses offered there. Perhaps it is the sheer number of master paintings from the Peter Paul Ruebens Altar backdrop to the Gentileschis, to the ceiling panels, which my friend Alan said he could spend a week studying just in themselves. Pastors in the US wondering what might increase their attendance might learn from this.

It was a tip to visit a very different church that led to meeting another wonderful person and the best burger bar in the world. Several years ago my wife and I found ourselves outside a locked church building in a driving rainstorm when we ran down the street and ducked into a door in the beach suburb of Bocadasse. There we met the owner, Luca, who with his broad smile, delightful countenance, and genuine hospitality invited us to spend the afternoon.

3 years later to the week, our Excursion guests got off the train after a delightful day visiting the bluewater bay and 10th Century abbey of San Fruttuoso, into a driving rain storm. After a one mile walk through the rain, we arrived at Luca’s where he greeted the group just as the rain stopped.

He immediately made friends with several group members just as he had the previous week with the previous group. But for stormy weather we’d never have met Luca, eaten the best burgers anywhere and introduced the group to another wonderful Genovese.

A final personal story comes from the mountain town of Ovada. Ligurian, to be sure, but with a Sienese look. Here is where the internet and perhaps Providence comes into play. I posted some pictures of Ovada on Twitter when we walking its winding streets and right away received a Direct Message from a follower I didn’t know I had asking me if we might meet in the city. He had something to give me. So after wandering through this delightful town and its churches and streets, Alan and I settled into the cafe on the main piazza for a panino and beer. I let my follower know where we were and within 5 minutes, up walks a beautiful silver bit pull leading a young man holding treasures. He introduced himself as Angelo. He started following me on Twitter after I posted how to make homemade liqueurs. He sat with us and told us how he and his father bought land in the valley near Ovada four years ago and planted 20 acres of almonds. This year was their first harvest and Angelo wanted me to have three bags. Now I defy you to tell me there’s no hope in humanity.

Since that meeting, Angelo has met Rosa and offered to supply her with almonds for her gelato. He’s met with Sabri and offered to provide him almonds for his dry goods shop. I even received a message from Fanny, our B&B hostess, telling me that Angelo saw her on the street, recognized her from one of my pictures and introduced himself. That, friends, shows how small this large world can be in practice. Oh, and yes, of course I made liqueur with Angelo’s almonds. Now I think about who here could connect with Angelo to share best practices.

At Thanksgiving this past November, I cheerfully recalled my interactions with Matteo, the poulterer who I met near the church of St Mary Magdalen. I put on the apron he gave me as a gift, the apron one cannot buy anywhere because they were made specifically for his family. I wore that apron while preparing the Thanksgiving turkey and sent Matteo the pictures.

Our Excursion guests are still in touch with each other and with us. Many are already signed up for next year’s trips eager to find more linkages between some other past and their present lives. They’ve told their friends about basilisks and fig trees growing out of mortar walls, and gelato and widened the circles of those interested in making a big world small.

Genoa is a wonderful city and we’d love for you all to come on a future Cultural Debris Excursion or to go there on your own. The mountains, the Mediterranean, the churches, the museums, they’re all wonderful and you’ll exhaust your available days before you’ll see all the sights of this magnificent place. But if you look slightly deeper than the tourists on two-hour guided tours off their cruise ship, or following their umbrella-holding guide off a coach tour, you’ll meet Elena and Fanny, Rosa and Sabri and Luca, and maybe Angelo will be in town bringing almonds and maybe he’ll say hi to you as well.