We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes…
Madeleine L’Engle, The Rock That is Higher: Story as Truth
Life is different in Italy. Different to any place that I know.
Then again, I could say the same of New Zealand, and of Istanbul.
I know I find points of intersection in each place I go, as well as individual features that make me love those people, or that view.
There are the things that seem familiar and take me home. And the views that fill me with longing for places I've known ...
Home is a thing I've been trying to define forever. Is it inside of me or back in that place where I was born and raised. 'My' country or those places where I've felt most welcome. Or that place where I felt a deep (and inexplicable) sense of recognition and would have liked to have stayed a while, just to see because I feel like I'm still looking.
Some places engage me, so deeply, that I could spend years just attempting to photograph the feeling of them. The moods, the light, the people ...
Genova's like that for me.
Anyway ... I'm listening to this particular song by Sting as I work here. On repeat, as I do sometimes.
Wandering in Italy often allows you to see things as they might have been.
The cyclist rode into my shot while I was distracted by my camera settings and trying to capture the soldiers, who had appeared suddenly.
And then seemed to disappear just as suddenly too.
At first I considered the image a reject. I don't like blurring my foregrounds however I'm keeping this one. There's something I like about it ...even if it's simply the feeling that I was caught out of time, just for a moment or two.
A palimpsest is a manuscript page, either from a scroll or a book, from which the text has been either scraped or washed off so that the page can be reused, for another document.
Source: wikipedia.
I remember being introduced to that word, palimpsest, and its meaning back in university and falling madly in love with the idea of it. I love discovering layers and traces ... old stories, other stories.
But perhaps Genova's caruggio walls work in much the same way for me. They tell stories over stories over stories in a way that becomes beautiful.
And Genova's Palazzo Ducale is more tempting than most. Whoever organises their cultural events is surely nothing less than a genius. I also missed a Robert Capa exhibition there back in summer ... I imagined I would return before it was finished.
And so ... a wall in a caruggi somewhere in the ancient city of Genova.
