Main Street, Genova.

And now I am in a beautiful city, in a truly beautiful city, Genoa.  I walk on marble, everything is marble: the stairways, the balconies, and palaces.  The palaces are so close they almost touch and from the street, one can see noble ceilings, all richly painted and gilded... 

Here I open my eyes wide on everything, innocently, simply ...'

Gustave Flaubert.

There are streets like this in Genova ...

Via XX Settembre is a street that always makes me want to stop and attempt to capture something of the light. 

It's still beautiful even when it rains.

Cees Nooteboom, and a Genoa Image

Photography is a more intense way of “looking”. No photographer simply travels. He cannot allow himself the luxury of just looking around. He does not see landscapes; he sees photographs, images of reality as it might appear in a photograph.
Cees Nooteboom in 1982 in the Holland Herald, KLM’s in-flight magazine.

I saw a beautiful street, the Via Aurelia, and now I am in a beautiful town, a really beautiful town, Genoa.  I walk on marble, everything is made of marble: stairs, balconies, palaces.
Gustave Flaubert, 1845, extract from a letter to a friend.

I could spend an entire day here in Via XX Settembre, in Genova, just photographing the light as it changes under this beautiful covered sidewalk.

Yes, that was me ...

I was that woman who apparently screamed as she fell yesterday on Via XX Settembre, bending my knee in a way that it hasn't bent in quite a few months. I was so sure I had either cracked something inside the knee or my achilles tendon had finally snapped.

I lay back on the rain-soaked pavement and waited for the agony to arrive however a lovely Genovese man came along, spoke to me and started helping me up. I was stunned, it hurt, I was shaking but it wasn't bone-shattering pain.

Once he had made sure I was okay and Gert had taken over, we walked on to the railway station. Me drenched from head to toe and limping ...

And so it was that I returned home from Italy.
My Belgian had come to bring me back after 17 days in Genova.
It was 2 hours to Milano by train, then an hour through Milano to the airport by bus, then a 1 hour and 10 minute flight to Brussels and a final 35 minute bus ride home to Antwerpen city and voila, here I am, freezing in the fog, surrounded by the mess of semi-unpacked bags, working out the when and the how and the why of the days ahead.

Full of stories, a few 1000 photographs and some really excellent memories.

Today, in Genoa, Italy

This morning, I set out on a 6km walk to Boccadasse and like the adventurers of old, I was working without a map. Unfortunately navigation isn't a natural talent of mine...

To avoid mocking by any Genovese reading this, I won't write of the route I took but I was lost for quite sometime however the journey was surely as much a part of the destination.

You see, I found this as I was wandering along Via XX Settembre. The light was just so and this photograph was the result.