Some mornings, here in Italy, it feels like I am living in an enormous mansion … that my apartment is merely one of the many rooms located in that solid mass of building that is my Genovese home.
I doze for a while, in the mornings, windows open/shutters closed, waking again and again ... to the sound of voices passing by, down in the narrow medieval alleyway. I am woken by conversations, by greetings shouted …by bursts of laughter, dogs barking, children calling. Metal roller doors being rolled up, as if thrown by a giant hand intent on making the most noise possible.
I imagine the people who belong to the voices. Italians, living their routine, stopping for coffee … friends who meet everyday, on their way.
The progress of my days are measured by the rise and fall of the noise, down there on Via Ravecca … coffee cups clattering, saucers rattling, cutlery clinking ... then a slow easing into the quiet of mid-afternoon, before a crescendo that becomes a solid hum, as those same morning friends settle into aperitivo after work.
I make up stories, at my desk in the Italian kitchen … stories of lives long lived in one place. Of generations.
I am quietly envious.
I feel like an orphan.
Sometimes, I am startled awake by a wild and angry voice in the early hours of a morning, or a suitcase rolling over the massive paving stones.
Suddenly the cafe's metal security door is rolled up, 6am … clattering and rattling directly below my bedroom.
One lunch time, I watched an old man lean out from his window across the alley, to shake his tablecloth clean of crumbs. We smiled at one another
Sitting here, writing and editing photographs … I hear a small 3-wheeled truck manuvoring its way along the narrow caruggi. Scooters zip through. People are passing by constantly. University students, carrying their heavy porfolios, businessmen in blue suits, the old men and women, the shoppers, the mothers with their babies.
I leave my windows open, pretending I am a part of this beautiful living tapestry.
The conversations … I have learned 'va bene' via that open window. And I practice my 'ciao' by repeating it whenever I hear it.
So often.
What do I love about Genova?
What has pulled me back here, since 2008 …?
What fuels the passion I feel for this little-known, often over-looked Italian city?
I love the secretive alleyways, known as caruggi by the Genovese.
I love the hills that surround the city. And the Ligurian Sea that caresses its feet.
The colourful buildings. It is a city that glows apricot, pale yellow, terrocotta, green or blue metal shutter. The ruined buildings still inhabited, and not as ruined as they first seem, to my New Zealand eyes ….... eyes unaccustomed to ancient.
And then there's the Genovese light.
It transforms the ordinary, the ugy, the beautiful too.
It transforms everything it touches.
One evening, I glanced up and saw the wall across the alley changed. The ordinary, slightly dull yellow surface, was singing gold in the evening light.
Perhaps it is this promise of transformation. Both of the city, as the light moves across it, and of me …
When I am there, I walk often, drinking in the light and sights via my camera.
I lose weight, I grow strong.
Somehow, this Genovese life strips everything away, and leaves me reliant on my senses … and my camera, translating all I see, all that makes me curious, into images.
The centro storico, the old city, comes alive, like a creature … a 2,000 year old creature,who has a heartbeat and a soul. She allows me to walk her streets with impunity.
Camera in hand, I feel like a child of hers … I feel safe.
Zena, an ancient name she also wears with pride. She is a shapeshifting city. A living breathing city. She has a pulse. She whispers to me, every single day I am there.
Sometimes, I feel the weight of centuries pressing down on me. It is a simple thing to feel ghosts walking with me, around me, caught in other times perhaps or, more simply, still present, just slightly out of focus.
But most of all, there is this comforting feeling that things have been like this forever … that the streets carry the imprints, visible or not, of the millions of feet that have walked here.
Tracks have been worn, habits and customs formed, and generations born here … since forever.
