Here I am ...
I've been busy with putting together advertising texts and images. Busy with family matters. And with other complicated things too.
Basically I've been messing with my life/work balance ... that's to say I haven't really had any balance as my life is a blend of 'both' and 'everything'.
Then today ... I began pulling out all the equipment and cables I travel with. Charging camera batteries, adding my USB modem to my camera bag and finding sunhoods for lense. And that cable that hangs from the window in Genova, enabling me to receive an internet connection that has to fight its way through the massive stone wall built centuries ago, the one that was inspired by a Genovese desire to keep the Holy Roman Emperor Barbarossa out in the 1100s.
As it turns out, that city wall is still an effective barrier today.
Miss 10 changed schools a few months ago and the route is no longer 2 trams and an hour each way. These days, when I take her, we ride through the park and arrive after 10 minutes of cycling. This morning I came home raving about the air out there.
It's Spring and it rained all night. That beautiful juicy, sweet-smelling rain that inspires me to open windows while I work at my desk. This morning we woke to moist warm air that smelt of flowers, wet beech trees, and oaks, and the earth too.
Nature was in the ascendent and it was divine.
Steel-grey clouds have filled the sky for now, and as I write this, a massive torrential downpour is happening. The rhubarb will be loving it. And I am too.
Genova, by Simone Trucco &Valerio Andreani
By Simone Trucco e Valerio Andreani, with music by Bruno Coli.
The scenes filmed are exquisite and give you a real sense of Genova, and the villages and mountains nearby.
Congratulations to everyone involved on a work beautifully done.
In the Caruggi, Genova
Home ...
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.
Palimpsest ... perhaps.
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.