The first thing in Genoa by which I was completely dazzled – but far from the last – was hidden away inside the 17th-century monastery complex of Sant’Ignazio. In an echoey refectory hall, a dozen or so pages of parchment and vellum were arrayed across wooden tables.
There were treatises in Latin and Majorcan Arabic, and an enormous Ottoman-era decree, crowned with the gleaming gold calligraphic tughra of the sultan; another bore the signature of a 12th-century pope. Impressive enough on their own, but before I left I was shown other rooms, in which thousands more such documents were carefully shelved and cord-bound; lined head to toe, I was told, they would stretch about 40km.
