The cooking of Liguria, like that of most of Italy's regional cuisines, reflects the geography, history and economics of the region. Though it is, in large part, a cuisine in which the ingenuity of perennially poor people produced excellent food, some of its primary innovations--such as pesto--no longer seem to hint of poverty. Instead, Ligurian inventiveness has turned the region's limited resources into a distinctive cuisine. La cucina dei genovesi has developed from a means of meeting basic human needs , while alleviating boredom with invention, to a means of delighting everyone from residents to visitors with the sensual pleasures of eating.
Liguria, popularly known in America as the Italian Riviera, is the second-smallest of Italy's administrative regions. Approximately 2,000 square miles in size, it stretches 200 miles from the French border town of Menton around the curve of the part of the Mediterranean known as the Ligurian Sea. The region is divided into four provinces, each of them named for its principal city: Imperia, Savona, Genova and La Spezia. Each of these towns is a port, but the coast is quite steep, and the interior of the region includes both the Ligurian Alps in the west and the Ligurian Apennines in the east. The name of the region is taken from the ancient Ligurii, a group of warring tribes who were driven out of the area, from the fourth century B.C., by Celts and various Middle Eastern settlers.
Genova (known in English as Genoa) is the capitol of the region, and home to a third of its population. The Genovese state ruled most of Liguria (including the French Riviera) from the sixteenth century until it was annexed by the kingdom of Sardinia in 1815. Dubbed "La Superba" by the great poet Petrarch in 1358, Genova had been a busy port or, sometimes, just a quiet fishing village for 1500 year when, in the tenth century A.D., it began to "redevelop as a commercial and maritime center" (Andrews x...