Top of the World
Within the historic center you can find a colorful little square known as Santa Brigida. Here, tall medieval houses circumscribe with their colorful facades a small slice of the city, which has become one of the brightest and prettiest corners of the historic center. Leaving, then, the wide Piazza del Vastato (today's Piazza della Nunziata) and proceeding in the direction of Principe Station, along that "Strada delli Signori Balbi," wealthy Genoese bankers, we come to that stretch of street where a dim "banner," which has very little historical value, announces that we have arrived at the place where, on March 24, 1403, the archbishop of Genoa, Pileo de Marinis, laid the first stone of the monastery that took its name from the saint. On the right, an underpass, followed by a flight of steps, gives access to a small square where time seems to have stood still: the completely renovated facades of typical medieval houses, which seem to rejoice in their new yellow and red clothes, frame the old truogoli (Santa Brigida's ancient wash-houses), supplied , by a spring called Bocca di Bove, a corner of silence where, stretching the ear, one still seems to hear the garrulous chatter of the merry washerwomen.
On the ancient canopy, brilliant with restoration, is mirrored a precious aedicule, the only prominent ornament in the essentiality of the square. To the left, a solid archway, the ancient entrance to the monastery, continues in a maze of alleys, rich in history, that climb up the hill to Corso Dogali.
These are the places where the Augustinian nuns arrived, coming from the turbulent heights of Sarzano, with the intention of building a church and dedicating it to the saint, Brigid, whose rule they followed (the rule of the Order of the Most Holy Savior of St. Brigid is an integration, in 27 capitals, of that of St. Augustine).
A member of the Swedish royal family, Bridget (1303-1373), a very young wife of the nobleman Ulf Gudmarsson and mother of eight children, stripped herself of her possessions when her husband died to give herself to a life of faith. On one of her many pilgrimages, made on foot or on the back of a mule, she arrived in Genoa where she found hospitality for a few months in the abbey of St. Jerome of Quarto, while waiting to embark for Rome, a hospitality she certainly did not return if, as legend has it, from the heights of the Peralto, turning her eyes toward the city she foretold its complete ruin.
Truogoli di Santa BrigidaThe Brigidine monastery of Genoa had a peculiar characteristic: it was designed for "cohabitation," albeit strictly separate, between friars and nuns, both cloistered, which imposed the construction of labyrinthine passages that give us an account of the future creuze.
