‘Genoa is about two things,’ he says: ‘money and food. We have to get the first to afford the important one.’ And he’s right, Genoa is famous for its ‘cucina povera’ - ‘cooking for the poor’.

‘Go to the market and see,’ he tells me. ‘There you’ll find all the rich city bankers buying their supper from the peasants selling their produce. Just like it’s always been. Then you’ll see what to eat.’

I end up opting for a classic Genoese eating establishment, just over the road from the heavily industrialised port. Two men at the next table notice my confusion as the waiter rattles off the specials of the day in Italian. ‘Have the marinated anchovies then the fritto misto [fried baby fish], it’s cheap and excellent,’ mutters the bearded one in perfect English. ‘I’m a sailor, by the way - I come here often.’ So we get talking about life on the ocean wave. Which is, of course, the start of how I end up with the most God-awful grappa-induced hangover.

Dangerous liaisons

There is still a whiff of danger about Genoa. It is the sort of place where it feels quite normal to join people you’ve only just met for after-dinner drinks. I do just that. It seems I’ve made a sound choice - my companions are the most civilised of men, superior sailors, interested in talking about food, wine and how they run their very large ship - transporting coal to America - almost entirely by computer.

Some time after one of our final requests to the waiter - ‘We’ll have a bottle of grappa’ - I return to my hotel by taxi. Portside Genoa is no place for a girl on her own to wander around at night. Any bravado on that score is put paid to by my impromptu (and rather large) dining pals: they always take a taxi back to their ship - or rather tanker. It wasn’t so much the pickpockets they worried about as the prostitutes’ persistent and assertive importuning.

Like all port cities, Genoa has an aura of transience about it. It is a place where you are tempted to simply move on the next day, erasing any memory of your horrifying behaviour from the night before. But come the morning I’m still there, stumbling through the narrow streets of the old city, sunglasses firmly in place.

As places go, Genoa’s medieval city centre is good for wandering around with a thumping hangover. The tall town houses are crowded so close together that they block out the sharp Mediterranean sunlight. There are streets that are permanently in the shade and I seek them out as I repeat my newly discovered mantra: never talk to sailors.

The city market is housed in a cavernous building off the monumental arcaded nineteenth-century shopping street, the Via XX Settembre. Blink and you’ll miss the entrance, squeezed in between the smart shops, but inside it opens into a vast space packed with stalls. The place resembles a market scene from a Fellini film - provided, that is, you think in black and white.

There’s an old crone waving her bunches of herbs and tomatoes in my face; her neighbour with live snails crawling eagerly out of their jars; a tripe man with his bright-white pile of intestines; a fishmonger chopping the legs off an octopus the size of a small child.

It was on the well trodden path to Portofino, just down the coast, that I first visited Genoa, as a seriously wet-behind-the-ears gap-year Inter-Railer. Back then, I stepped out of the vast main station, backpack in place and wandered briefly around the old city. I ate the obligatory slice of focaccia (the flat olive oil bread which is the student staple) and got straight back on the train, away from the dirt and the traffic of the city.

A few years later, fresh out of university, I came back to stay with a friend in the hills above Camogli - a fishing port half an hour by train down the coast. My friend had broken his leg by slipping on a rock while fishing for octopus (a good excuse if ever I heard one). It curtailed our clubbing, but we took the train into Genoa at night for some serious drinking with folk he knew from the university. We had a laugh, but I was glad to get back to that hillside villa at dawn.

This time I am here to stay - for a weekend at least. And as the hangover fades I become more and more entranced. Maybe it is because I am older and now able to take in the occasional museum without breaking into a yawning fit. But there is also something else: the Italians have, after decades of neglect, finally woken up to the fact that there is something quite superb about this city poised at an angle between the sea and mountains. And recently they have been throwing money at it. With results.

It is a statue of Christopher Columbus that you see on leaving the Stazione Principe, the grandly over-the-top main station. When the Genoese compiled a list of the great men of the city in the mid-sixteenth century, they were sufficiently pompous to leave out Columbus despite the fact that he was born here. Centuries later and they are grabbing the opportunity (plus the EU money) to restore the city in commemoration of his achievements.

Today, there are many other additions as well. Genoa boasts Europe’s largest aquarium, housed in a converted ship alongside the Porto Antico, from where liners once set sail for the Americas. My sailors (as I like to think of them) were great fans of this - as they were of the new Naval Museum. On the basis that they saw so many of them in ports around the world, they were less enthusiastic about the Bigo - the vast crane which you can go up in a terrifying revolving lift. At least, I imagine it must be terrifying, but then I have vertigo, (even when I am sober) so I decide not to try it out.

I feel quite dizzy enough staring up at the towering façades of the tall houses. Many were badly damaged by bombing during World War II and are now being gradually rebuilt. The house beside one of the entrances to the old City, the Porta Soprana - in which it’s claimed Columbus was brought up (highly unlikely, according to most historians) - was also bombed. This time by the French in the seventeenth century. A quick visit to the Palazzo Ducale reveals that after decades of Genoese bankers delicately fleecing much of Europe through their alliance with Spain, the French dumped over 14,000 bombs - or rather shells - on the city in three days. It’s a wonder there is anything left.

Every so often I come across an area of construction work where a gaping hole allows a headache-inducing view of bright-blue sky. This provides a rare reminder I am beside the Mediterranean. Your first sight of the city - whether arriving by train along the coast from France or by air - may be the water, but this isn’t the pretty, palm-fringed side of the Italian Riviera. It’s not just that the port itself is a land of cranes and railways, containers and wharfs. Genoa is a vertical city. It stretches over 30km of coast, but step inland and the mountains rise straight up. No space, then, for a promenade. People commute down to work from their flats and back up the hillside in lifts, and if you travel through the city by road you’ll find yourself in a tunnel more often than not. It is not for the faint-hearted.

And that’s Genoa, sometimes scary - sailors, pickpockets, prostitutes, grappa, octopus-chopping and tunnels - but always exciting. I’m glad I managed to stay for a weekend this time.

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