In summer 2015, I rode the beautiful wood-paneled elevator to Castelletto with my friend Michela Fierro, a medical school librarian. When we stepped onto the Belvedere Montaldo, the whole city opened before us as if we were in a cinematic panorama. The two of us gazed out on an urban sea of every imaginable style of palazzo, church, shop, warehouse, dock — and even a lighthouse, erected in 1543 and known as La Lanterna — all of it tumbling chockablock toward the actual eye-stinging blue sea.

“I’m still discovering my own city, and I doubt I’ll finish before I die,” my friend said as we slipped over to the Antica Farmacia Sant’Anna. The monastic apothecary produces Acqua di Sant’Anna, a unisex fragrance (my wife says too fragrant), and Acqua di Melissa, which is meant to calm nerves, essential when having lost your way, which you can count on doing.

Michela’s cherished secret spots included the offbeat Piazza della Giuggiola, an exquisite square paved with river rocks rivaled only by the nearby Piazza dell’Olivella in tranquillity and poetic otherworldliness. But probably the most unusual things she pointed out that afternoon were the double entrances to buildings built on slopes so steep, they can be reached from either the street below or the one above, often by way of a catwalk that delivers you to a second front door on the roof. Only in Genoa.

Only in Genoa: The Castello D’Albertis, with its collection of ethnographic artifacts and its Turkish sitting room, is just one of the dozens of over-the-top, architecturally mishmashed villas built by sea captains and merchants that are tucked into these hills like almonds in a bar of chocolate.

Only in Genoa: The paradox of these densely built slopes is that they suddenly deliver you to wide open Via Garibaldi, which is lined with rigorously balanced, ornate palazzi built in the 16th and 17th centuries by the city’s powerhouse families, one next to the other — Bel Air gone Baroque. Today Via Garibaldi is a street full of banks and law firms and, more accessibly, Palazzo Rosso and Palazzo Bianco. The two museums are awash with paintings by Veronese and Van Dyck, and acres of gilded furniture, mirrors and porcelain, the swag of its day, constituting a vivid snapshot of the Genovese aesthetic: showy and understated, luxe and frugal, public and (more typically) private.

Image The design store Via Garibaldi 12. Credit... Andrea Wyner for The New York Times

At Via Garibaldi 12, the city’s pre-eminent design store, Michela and I fantasized about what it might feel like to toast the sunset with Murano glasses bubbling with prosecco, while sitting on Gio Ponti chairs under a fresco of buxom goddesses floating on clouds. If there is a more striking example of retail panache anywhere in Italy I’ve never seen it.