Liguria has produced an improbable number of world-historical figures for such a small region. Christopher Columbus was born in Genoa around 1451. Andrea Doria, the republic's greatest admiral, shaped 16th-century Mediterranean politics. Giuseppe Garibaldi — the general who unified Italy — was born in Nice when it was still Ligurian. Goffredo Mameli, who wrote the Italian national anthem, was a Genoese student of nineteen.
More recently: Niccolò Paganini was born in Genoa and became the most technically virtuosic violinist in history. Eugenio Montale, also from Genoa, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975 — his poetry is deeply rooted in the Cinque Terre landscape. Fabrizio De André, perhaps Italy's greatest singer-songwriter, spent much of his life on a farm in Sardinia but was Genoese to his bones. Renzo Piano, who redesigned Genoa's waterfront and went on to design the Pompidou Centre and the Shard, grew up watching ships being built in the port.