This screen shot from map of transport routes will give a sense of how roads run round cliff edges. How we took the ascensore (little picture) and then walked around route 36.
and opposite that park came upon
with a menu board outside, nowhere else, but food to please, light and simple
Atmosphere,
art
and nice people...
We were the only people who did not live nearby.
A gentleman, white haired, in a group at the next table, rising to depart, much older than I, twice as many walking sticks, turned and said to us
"eye hoerpeh eye weel see you ahgaern-eh here."
But in the evening, though invited back for music and drinks, we slept...
and then we went and waited for the funicolare to ride home
We did not stop at the Cinque Terre just down the road, but we did take the bus to Boccadasse.
Stunned on getting off the bus to encounter the Alfa Romeo of wondrous gurgles, timber steering wheel and sculpted bottom, unaffordable and unrequited... after which I lusted fifty ears ago, this example wearing plates of that era [GE for Genova], mis-tarted and 1975, but still a warthog underneath, to quote Flanders and Swann.
Battery had died in camera, so photos by elderly Jiayu phone.
And later, after the seaside just down the road, a darker grey of the JaguarMkII that I owned briefly in 1969. Driving that in Rome, stopped in traffic, several times I was approached by swiftly sidling middle aged men in refined skirts and twinsets, Dame Edna spectacles, heels and handsome handbags, begging a lift. That's another story or four, but here's the car, not as shiny as mine was. A visitor said he'd buy mine if I drove it to London, which I did, in filthy December snow storm, not having realised in balmy Rome and not, being a bit barmy, having done any preparation of the car... not having realised that the heating did not work.
And so I delivered it, with its ownership clear not from appropriate documents but the tattered piece of paper on which a succession of minor American persons of movie involvement had passed it hand to hand from Tangiers to Rome. I delivered it to this young lawyer friend of friend, at fashionable home his present and presenting tea mother and grand mother.They paid up though a bit startled by the paucity of documents.
How curious to have my half century ago life placed before me, bookending a visit to a beach.
Such a beach!
It does lack the quaint which for some tourists means Italy
It did bring a succession of wedding photograghings
there is a beach
and sparkling sea
Then time to wait for another bus...
These seats are actually very comfortable
from the bus window
il corraggio di sognare: the courage to dream
it's still morning, people going out for the day
From Boccadasse to Brignole station, then one stop on a train to get out at
Piazza Principe, reinvigorating with fresh orange juice, spremuta di arancia
before taking the Ascensore Montegalletto (earlier post)
and walking along to San Nicola in search of lunch
Saturday was shiny. We bought @ EUR4,50 two 24 hour transit passes just across the street and traveled first out to the Staglieno Cemetery and back, then to Via XX Settembre to get a SIM for phone, then to seaside Boccadasse, then to the Brignole station from where one stop on a long distance train to the Piazza Principe where intent upon walking the length of the famous Via Balbi but diverted to ride the Ascensore Montegalletto, videos in previous post. A walk around rim at that level, to lunch in an unexpected very local cafe with lightest imaginable food and family atmosphere, before riding the Zecca-Righi funicolare to our front door.
Cimitero Staglieno
This is up high to the east in the city.
An email from Kim had drawn attention to it as reported in Atlas Obscura. Wikipedia will tell you that the widow of Oscar Wilde is buried there and English Wikipedia mentions her ahead of heroes of Italian unification.
We have found that cemeteries in Italy have a lot of character and stories to tell.
This Staglieno cemetery perhaps reflects something about Genova. The wealthy who lived here in the end of the 1700s resisted having a cemetery in their front yard, they also were alarmed when Napoleon wanted them down in the (plague and cholera risky) city where they could be watched. Delaying the cemetery towards the mid 1800s.
I asked the driver where it was and with a grin he said "here!" And we realised that as with other cemeteries in Italy but here large scale, it has a penitentiary look.
Inside there are arcades of monumental things.
But also, right in the middle of the entrance, a pallet of things like big empty cement bags. These are, as specified, and as provided for under the specified regulations, bags for urban refuse, "from exhumation and extombation" ... as explained, ordinary folk get 10 or 30 years in the ground.
Grander folk get a longer time. As to be seen in images. Grander sculpture rendered a bit goth by long accumulated thick dust. Simpler graves for those who pay by the hour. Which brought to my mind that down in the centre where we are living, we are on the streets of elegance, below us in a bowl down to the harbour is a maze of interesting narrow winding streets and upwards narrower lanes with often enough working women bright dressed leaning on walls or meandering even at 10am. "It is a seaport after all" remarked Helen, whose earliest workplace was in its foundation days on the first Sydney 24 hour sexual assault and incest team, where met a number of working women who came for support. And where no client ever succeeded in any legal process... My point being, at least in a metaphor, how even in death there are those who display their relationships and those who just pay for a bit of time.
Perpetual graves of those "fallen for liberty"
photographing the admiral
You will see in this how the dust of ages has given added relief to the sculptures
A city that has invented jeans, focaccia, pesto, hydrofoils and lots more (including a non-party political party, internet based, the larger-voted member of the present coalition government of Italy, whose founder refused to run for parliament, whose parliamentary leader refused to be prime minister, who as deputy prime minister is in China beating off allegations that he travelled business class to get there, which his boarding pass says he didn't), a city whose ships historically put fear into the hearts of pirates of the Mediterranean, a city of practical dreamers like Cristofero Colombo who nagged the Spanish queen and king to give him the money to sail west to find China but found the Caribbean instead, a dream city, blowsy in late summer heat, scrunched into a hillside... it's different, innovative, and has some astounding public transport. All the following can be used with regular EUR1.50 tickets for 100 minutes or 4.50 for 24 hours: in addition to trolley buses that down poles and become diesel electric when the wires run out, funicular railways, a tardis-like elevator to the Castelletto Belvedere (where is indeed bel seeing) there is the perhaps unique Ascensore [lift] Montegalletto, an elevator which comfortably fitted four people, could take more, momentarily fitted a ticket inspector and which has on the wall a technical notice with glowing lights and text saying:
Some photos here but with three different cameras the results poor, or perhaps poorly displayed here on old computer. There is a lot of haze in the air. May need to switch on brains, switch on photoshop or adjust cameras. We are staying amid books in a very comfortable apartment in the centre of everything. Here is a view from bathroom, with ipad:
• Helen coming to terms with Skype on her iPad (later talking to daughters in Sydney);
• this elderly white MacBook adjacent on table awaiting my attentions on arrival of card reader (bought one now) to begin the pictorial story:
• Children's bedtime books to the left, including Italo Calvino's fables (English language novels in bookcase in bedroom). Francesca, our host is proprietor of a bookshop:
• out the double glazed windows a phalanx of useful buses and bus stops,
• beyond that the Zecca station entrance to the Zecca-Righi funicolare, as well as bins we use for rubbish and recycling.
night views from window
This is a city of people salt sprayed, muscular even when refined and classy, most sundarkened at least. On the edge of humour, delighted to talk, or certainly we meet intelligent and talkative people. Crowded and busy. I knew the taxis would be just to the left exiting the Piazza Principe station. I did not know that the taxis would be buried in a mass of humanity and vehicles piggledy piggledy, like coins in a Christmas pudding. But more like the circumstances of Norman Lindsay's Magic Pudding or some Old Testamental Moses moment, when we were on board then hey presto pots and pans the seas divided the taxi leapt through it all and away. The dogs in Italian cities are always entertaining.
Naples is also a seafaring city of the sea, but Genoa has a strong republican history, not the pressure of royal occupation and exploitation that Naples retains in these national republican times, a bog complicated when Naples lost the kingdom’s tax income in 1860, whereas Genoa was at centre of the new national kingdom then and it is the Genoese Beppe Grillo who established the internet based Five Star Movement, Movimento Cinque Stelle [M5S], the not-a-party which is the major party in the present coalition government of Italy. Grillo a blogger with history in comedy on TV. It's easy here to see him as part of the city's mental and emotional fabric.
His brother, many years ago, had ridden his motorbike
from Manchester to Genoa, to the tiny fishing
village of Boccadasse. Leaning over a rail to see
the boats and fishermen, he had been invited to eat and stay.
The brother killed by brain tumour in 2014,
the family loves Genoa
and makes a pilgrimage every two years.
According to a cheerful man from Manchester, whose fine English Bull Terriers today came sniffing for our Coppa Piacentina (we will be in Piacenza next week) which not long before I had taken from bag to savour with a panino di farina integrale (a wholemeal roll) while Helen was setting up in the Piazza delle Ferrari to skype daughters,,, puff puff where was I, according to our sudden Mancunian friend, King Richard, to survive the Mediterranean ride to the crusades did as many did and flew the Genoa colours on his ship, those of St George, because the corsairs of Africa who slew everybody else slew not the Genoese because the Genoese corvettes were the fastest ships in the Mediterranean and the Genoese if anyone laid a finger on any of their ships came slaying with speed and without mercy. And thus, just a bit like the way Constantine made every Roman instantly christian (later children, different story) King Richard took St Georgery and the flag to England. Or so a Gentleman of Manchester, armed with two sniffing (such noses!) bull terriers, did tell me today. A good yarn and almost likely true. Where Seattle is also of the sea it’s spread out and often cold and drawn into itself whereas this is a fantastic like-crushed-up-paper hillside jumble, people tossed together. We crossed the street to the funicular yesterday after 5 and rode up with people who’ve never been elsewhere, older women full of conversation and advice on where to go, wishes for our happy travels. Thanks to my week at the Rome Berlitz school in April 1968 I can sometimes speak with a refinement not heard since romantic novels of about 1900. Someone Helen's age yesterday said her grandfather had had a hat just like mine.
Here is someone else's excellent movie of the funicular So I am able to ask questions and occasionally understand answers and conversation is assuredly risk-free with my spouse beside me and my Manfrotto monopod masquerading as a walking stick (and very useful and strong as such).
In a walking stick the 'attacco rapido' may sound an asset in the big city
but in Italian it means attach rapidly—attach the camera rapidly.
Of course I have last year's Manfrotto Monopod, which lacks the
attacco rapido, but bad guys won't know that.
Anyway... We had asked on the upgoing where to go for the best view: to the top, to Righi, they all said. At the top we took photos and spoke to a lady at a bus stop who said we could take the next bus to catch another bus, then... etc. And then she said no, go back down on the funiculare, next one at 1815, go to San Nicola, at San Nicola take the 477 (unmistakably quattro sette sette, she so nicely repeated it all several time. So we got off at San Nicola, took the elevator to street level, emerging into this new and refined street of town or suburb. There was however no quattro sette sette but there was a sign for the tre sette sette and here came a nifty little mainly-standing but almost-empty bus called 377. Which we boarded. A speedy-speedy few-minutes trip along and around and about a ledge to another settlement, Castelletto (link gives nice history, yes there was a castle there one thousand years ago...this on the first ledge uphill, a jolly puffing-out kind of run for any pirate or more officially-appointed bastard to come out of the sea and try to get you) ...asking the smart young driver on exit where to go for the elevator. Which he advised. Then suddenly beside us again a minute later he comes with a bit more instruction and smiles, though our walk was very short and his kindness reflected kindness not deep necessity of awkward route. A huge bar, with among other things gelato; to sit among quiet, cheerful crowds at tables and garden seats, nice evening, slight breeze, Helen to see just over there a rooftop Jack Russell having what might be an every-night yap-yap old-couple complaint at a crow sitting looking superior up a close-by chimney.
=== ... Taking advantage of pilgrims — here's more context, writes the debit-card-and-bank-dependent pilgrim-traveller.. As we these days know too well, banking is an evolving adventure in innovative product conjuring. The banchi emerged several centuries after the Knights Templar had invented letters of credit. The Knights Templar had it rough in defending pilgrims to Jerusalem. On Palestinian paddocks their (just like Genoa) red crosses on white shirts were a bit like smart targets, easy for the hostiles to pick off. But in the Templar back offices in relatively comfy Europe noble guys doing what the pope said they must and ducking off to do some crusading were pleased to leave their valuables in the care of the Templars, who issued Letters of Credit to people who could thus buy Nutella sandwiches etc on presentation of their Letters of Credit in the Holy Land. As all good pawn offices know, owners might well not return. But then when the pope was based in Avignon, another story, in the early 1300s, and crusading had gone beyond Western Front tragic, involving also too much side-event rape and pillage of the marginally different Christian folk with stuff to loot, and the French king had gotten into too much debt to the by-now-filthy-rich Templars, the king put it to the pope that there must be something a bit suspicious about these Templars who as a matter of policy and constant practice rode two up on their horses. Under kingly pressure (the pope had of course skipped from Rome to Viterbo to Avignon to get away from the worse-than-nagging Holy Roman Emperor) the pope cancelled the Templars, gave their assets to the St John's lot whom we used to see running onto Rugby fields before that turned professional, the king cancelled his Templar debts and a number of high up templar people got into quite serious, for some extremely prejudicial, difficulties. The higher up the more they got stretched etc and the more they confessed. ....an approximation of the news from Wikipedia.
Here is an unexpected (and slightly relevant to that last bit) gift. Sorry, no Coca Cola glasses available here:
This is from note to family. I realise reading it again how much my writing, when let loose, remains influenced by reading all of JP Donleavy’s books in the 1970s.
Herewith at 4am, lunchtime back there at home.
I am full of impressions and observations on our journey here. The China Airlines aircraft and crew wonderful. Taipei airport full of geographic confusion including for young man assigned to push wheelchair. We did not actually kill anyone; I had enough Chinese to ask him to wait for the far behind Helen.
I had had neck problems on way from Sydney. In the famous (to those who know it) Hello Kitty shop in the Taipei airport I bought world’s best quality neck wrap-around. Excellent results wearing it.
Wheelchair assistance in Rome meant sliding down an alley apart from very large crowd of morning-arriving Americans jammed for immigration. Guided by smiling Peruviana, resident of Italy. This airport employment just June to September for the mob. To the gate for diplomatici, aircrew and autorizzati.
We had time at the Roma Termini station to wander, sit, eat, etc and buy a couple of buckets of salads and water for the train. Advance purchase of train tickets meant EUR60 (AUD100) for two, for first class seats at a two person table on an uncrowded Frecciabianca for five hours along coast and spectacular countryside just after summer harvests.
I asked a person at Roma Termini station ticket gate where we could get some fruit. She said back there in the Mercato Centrale. I said they (in modern market of highly prepared stuff) said no, go downstairs. She said, now in English, ok go out the door into the street and go left etc to the supermarket downstairs. I repeated back in Italian and she grinned and said si. Cleaner beside her offered his observation that going outside I would be robbed by Italians. He probably says such things to or about the passing parade of Americans all the time, for thrills. At TripAdvisor sometimes they ask how not to look like tourists and other Americans say you can’t. I’d now make the observation that dress is less important, what would be good would be a little less self preoccupation, a little more empathy, a little smiling observation and movement among others in crowds. Hopefully tourist numbers will be less in a month.
It’s like diving in the sea or something, to suddenly converse again in Italian. Brain and vocabulary muddled along the journey by Chinese, and by the situation that Taiwan voices and manners are so different from Beijing. Three conversations of note yesterday coming here. The first while waiting (not enough conversation minutes) in short queue for SIM at TIM shop with a gentleman of 80 whose wife was at the counter. His mother was a teacher in Ancona advised by fascist authorities that she would be sent to the Alto Adige, Bolzano, known to Austria as Sud Tirol, to this day solidly German speaking and schnitzeling... Mussolini’s italianisation policy. “But my husband” she had said. He’s going too then, they said. As the teacher father of Wanda wife of Eric Newby, was sent out of Slovenia into Tuscany.
We could have talked for hours but life got in the way. …
He was appalled at the situation now where the right wing Austrian government has offered citizenship to the people of the Alto Adige.
Coming from a country where for the most part soils are ancient, reduced in nutrients and drought is pervasive,
the passing scene from the train is so differient: farms with obviously deep soils,
farms not confined to broadacre but farmhouses surrounded by home supplies of olives, fruit and vegetables
Distinctive stone pines [Pinus pinea], majestic ornaments of Rome and here north in the Maremma.
Rain on the window.
On the train long conversations with a 74 year old road and bridge engineer retired, who is totally and charmingly besotted by the countryside in which he lives, Livorno, Lucca, Firenze, and who on reading through our travel book just kept turning back to the text of email from Silvia inviting us to her place in Chianti, taking from his pocket a soft pencil to gently gently place two lines beside reference to most beautiful place in his world.
North of Pisa, near Massa, where there are great lumps of white marble in yards plus major limestone crushing works, suddenly among the hills away from the sea... is that the alps?... no, it’s stunning peaky mountains with sides of shining white Carrara marble.
and a movie... I kept the camera rolling because it went on to display well coastal Tuscan countryside with towns and the sensible pattern of utilisation of free space for food cultivation.
It was curious to hurtle past the five stations of the Cinque Terre, a modern throngy-platformed millions-crowdy pilgrimage not to the cross but to these five celebritised villages of total population <4000, clinging to cliffs.
But what of the seasides, and larger and smaller beaches, spectaculars and quick-look-this-other-way hilltop towns and castles and churchy spires past which we swiftly fly? To rabbitly run to the Cinque Terre seems like watching a fine leg go by and fixing attention on a minor wartyness on a knee. Such a species we are.
Early along the way the train conductor was a young, tall, elegantly straight-walking young man of slightly misty air ... Hey look, Helen, here he comes again now, so elegantly, leading down this aisle a woman finely dressed and coiffed, of my age, their hands held high delicately. And later, as I’m coming from the little refreshment bar, they come past again. “La romanza grande di Trenitalia” I quietly smiling say. To which she smiling replies “e mio figlio”. He’s my son. And so I say “Mia moglie dice che lui puo sposarsi ad una delle nostre figlie” (my wife says he can marry one of our daughters). To which he quietly replies with a smile “va bene”.
6 October 1941, during Mussolini's visit to Pontecchio in Romagna,
the widow Marchesa Maria Cristina Bezzi Scali Marconi
and daughter Elettra, accompanied by
a fascist elder, at the memorial to her scientist husband.
Marconi was to see Mussolini on 20 July 1938
but had a heart attack and died that day.
Wearing... a fascinator.
She was elegantissima, a figure who reminded me in elegance of the widow Marconi who would come to dinner occasionally at my ancient ambassador’s residence end of 60’s in Rome.
From whom in this archival photo and beyond thus am I so few degrees separated? Perhaps as close to Mussolini as to Graham Greene via Omar Torrijos of Panama and the unintended election outcome in Santo Domingo 1978.
From Pisa north to Genova an interesting looking man of sharp features diagonally across the aisle. With the arrival of the conductor, now a lean older man, extensive consultations over his sheaf of tickets. The man come from Bologna, via Florence where missed connection, to a place on this train from Pisa. A positive outcome. He needed to duck back to Genova for a bag of his documenti, then back to Bologna for a plane to Romania next evening. The conductor provided along the way best connections back to Bologna, via Milano for next morning. The man, 64, Romanian, told me he had in the years of Ceaucescu trained in maritime eletromeccanico and gone to sea. Four times Singapore, five times Bangkok once overwhelmed by flooding rain there, once a breakdown for two weeks in Zamboanga, everywhere else except Australia, but a cousin in Melbourne, once 14000 sheep from Somalia to Saudi, plus 150 cattle, 10% mortality... they would not let him step ashore in Arabia Saudita as he was a communist, some other ship had to come for him. After Ceascescu he set up a timber business in the mountains. Ten years ago to Italy to train in hospital work. Was the timber business profitable I asked. No, he said, he was not a milliardario (like billionaire, historically un milliardo means 100,000,000 but has slipped into meaning billion) but although he had no children, he said, “in here (fist to heart) here I am milliardario.”
Our briefly encountered friend was at sea, not in Romania, in December 1989.
-----
Genova: pictures don’t convey it so well. Difficult, such verticality. So dense. Whereas the Cinque Terre villages are wilderness freckles of people historically on cliff edge away from pirates there and brigands the other way, here is a city carved on sea edge over long history, narrow streets packed to rafters and beyond with palatial structures. To get from station to apartment, a one km walk but not now with bags, taxi ducking down to pass the old port with ships with rigging, then up again into this maze of banking republic richness, where the great vied with each other in 1600ish to build a grander palace to accommodate and explode socks off princes and cardinals and at-home-but-not-here-gosh-wow big blokes from as far as Manchester. Banking by genteel intimidation. Nobility in England inherently lazy and preposterous. Nobility acquired in Italy in the last millennium by business acumen aka piracy or theft, war skills and nobbling pope or emperor for gongs. But skip the emperor and pope bits in republican Genoa. Just invent banking, own the lot. Not capitulating to any crown until Savoy, in 1859, when joined in process leading to Italy’s unification. We are in Via Cairoli, named for the family Cairoli, of whom Garibaldi said the Greeks had Leonides, the ancient Romans had the Fabi family, modern Italy has the Cairoli.
Our windows double glazed look upon busy street of buses, bus stops, people. The Largo Zecca Righi. Fifty metres over there to the bottom station of the funicolare
Our front door gives onto this not so wide pedestrian street Cairoli, the connecting street between the streets of the roll-registered palaces, the Rolli...where ten hours ago sitting for a small dinner outside a bar I manage in weariness to drop knife (used for tired no-longer-fresh schnitzel, metaphorically just like me) after dropping some penne arrabiate... and Helen knocks over her Heineken. While people wander by, evening-strolling (la passeggiata) with an adequate-for-Helen quantity of tame Labradors close to human knee, all quietly thinking “next we dine” and other notlabradors less restrained running three times further than mistresses yipping silently “hey there’s Luigi!” No rowdy, happy. Tourists rare.
Domani is not tomorrow, is in arrivo, quasi quasi.
Today we walk. With a project, as well as gawkery, of finding certain wool shops and on Friday an open free crochet school in a shop. Always good to have a project. Helen dreams of having an Etsy shop, her evening restorative crochet work focusing lately on freehand slouchy beanies of elegance.
