Places to see in Genoa & Portofino

The largest aquarium in Italy, on the restored old harbour, and the one thing in Genoa that everyone with children ends up doing. Two to three hours and busy at weekends. The harbour around it — Renzo Piano's rebuild of the waterfront — is worth the walk on its own.

The doge's palace of the Genoese republic, now the city's main exhibition space, opening onto the central square at one end and the old town at the other. Worth checking what is on rather than visiting for the permanent collection. The tower gives a view over the roofs.

One of the Rolli palaces on Via Garibaldi — the street of merchant houses so grand that the republic used them to lodge visiting heads of state, now collectively a world heritage site. Van Dyck portraits of the family that built it, and a roof terrace over the city. Ticketed with Palazzo Bianco next door.

The city's lighthouse and its oldest symbol, standing since the twelfth century in its present form and still working. Reached on foot along a walkway from the ferry terminal, with a small museum and a climb to the lower terrace. Out of the way, and quiet for it.

A former fishing village swallowed by the city, still a pebble cove ringed by ochre houses, twenty minutes east along the seafront promenade. Genoese come here for ice cream at sunset. The walk out along Corso Italia is half the point.

Genoa's covered market since 1899, in a former convent cloister off Via XX Settembre — produce and fish downstairs, a food hall on the upper level. The city's basil, and therefore its pesto, passes through here.

Striped black and white in the Ligurian manner, at the heart of the old town's alleyways. An unexploded naval shell from 1941 still sits inside where it landed. Free, central, and the natural pause in a walk through the carruggi around it.