Day 3 – Tue, April 9, 2019 – Genoa, Italy – Crystal Serenity – Monte Carlo to Venice

We got up, walked for an hour on the promenade (deck 7). The promenade deck is amazing on this ship. It is half covered all of the way and has no obstructions. It is much better than what is on the Symphony. We then all had breakfast in the dining room.

This is our first time visiting Genoa. Our plan was to get off the ship and wander around and see some sights. The ship offered a shuttle to the downtown main square, Piazza Raffaele de Ferrari. This was a great place to start our wanderings.

Genoa has a population of about 500K and 1.5M in the metro area. It is known as the birthplace of Christopher Columbus. It is also famous for focaccia and pesto. We first wandered into the Cathedral di San Lorenzo which was really cool.

We returned to the square and then headed to Via Garabaldi with it's many, many palaces. Most of the palaces were now banks and other businesses (this is now Genoa's financial district). Several of the palaces are on the UNESCO World Heritage list. Most of them had small courtyards that you could visit to see the frescos and other amazing building elements.

On our way back to the square, we decided to take a short cut down Via Angeli. Well, that was pretty much a mistake. About 2 blocks from Garabaldi, we started to see "Ladies of the Night" standing outside of doorways. We walked quickly by, but there were a LOT of them. We eventually made it back to the Ferrari square. We did a bit of shopping and then decided to take the advice of the bus guide person and got some focaccia. It was incredible. Very light, much more like a pizza crust than focaccia that we have in the US. We had multiple flavors, but Julie and Bob loved the simple one with just olive oil and salt.

After that, we got back on the bus heading back to the ship.

View from the ship.

Again, it was a fairly uneventful evening, with drinks, a fabulous dinner, and then maybe some more drinks :). The Bistro is a wonderful place to go after dinner to hang out and maybe have a snack after you skipped having dessert.

We dined in the Italian Specialty Restaurant, Prego, which is always wonderful.
Julie had:

Creamy King Crab Meat Salad

An Appetizer Portion of the Lasagna alla Casalinga (both Tomato and Bechamel sauces)

Grilled Black Angus Filet Steak

Bob had:

Arugla salad.

Minestra “Primavera di Verdura” soup

Bob also had a full portion of the lasagne, but forgot to take a picture (it looks the same as Julie's appetizer portion of lasagne, only larger).

Oops, I've forgotten to do the log of steps, here we are thus far:

Sun Apr 7 - 7,400 Steps, 3.2 Miles
Mon Apr 8 - 10,477 Steps 4.71 Miles
Tue Apr 9 - 18,503 Steps ~8 Miles (We walked on the ship and that got bad mileage data)