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:
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.
 |
| the Ascensore, elevator of Castelletto |
Many happy farewells... then a while later as we have completed a walking circuit and turn for home here come that elegant couple, she with news that further up, in Via Garibaldi, there will be aperitivi gratis, free drinks, so together we all walk that way. Helen and I come to a halt not at gratis but 4 oysters and a flute of pino grigio for EUR10 so we ask for that. It’s early, just heading for 8pm, we are first in no-queue, the young man assigned to oyster opening perhaps freshly from Africa is it seems opening his first ever oysters. The elegant couple coming now hooning back with thousand apologies, scusi tantis for saying gratis which alas they have not, scouting ahead, found. All is OK, we are more than pleased with what we have found.
The banco, the board in front of us piled with packages of ostriche, oysters, OSTRY-KEH, wine at the right hand end.
Enter stage right the probably-proprietor, something of an improbable proprietor, wild hair, huge smiles, like the rest of us totally high on the evening air, we starting to swoon at these astonishing oysters, said to be from France, definitely from far-off-on-Atlantic shores. A circus now begins: a circus of how to open a wine bottle, a discourse between proprietor and...is it his mother?...she, fumbling that task, has she never opened a wine bottle before? He demonstrates with elan, moves confidently to show how to do it ... and for quite some time gets in a mess. After the coup-de-grace I offer to whiff the cork to offer appreciation at their success in battle, but all about me shout no. no, é plastica, it’s just plastic, and eventually now Helen getting her nice plastic flute of wine but before we wander off here comes the proprietor full of life, from the left ,who has fished from under the banco a box of not-plastic-at-all glasses to offer us as a gift, well, to absolutely insist, a gift ... Life is special if you allow it... We will bequeath our four waisty Coca Cola glasses to Francesca.
 |
| man surprised to take home box of gratis CocaCola glasses |
A banco is a board, in Inglese a trestle table. It has thus also been the Italian word for bank, transmogrified into banca. Here in Genoa and Florence, Siena and Rome arose the first banks in the 1400s, men with resources putting up trestle tables, banchi, [the plural, pronounced bunky approximately] outside their houses, at their front doors, to do business. Some history of this in Rome on this page - open in Chrome to be offered a translation.
Here's the key bit:
Il nome di "Banchi", esteso alla zona che comprende anche le attuali via dei Banchi Nuovi e via del Banco di S.Spirito, si riferiva, appunto, ai banchi dove negozianti, banchieri, notai, scrivani e mercanti di ogni genere esercitavano i loro affari, sfruttando la vicinanza di S.Pietro e di ponte S.Angelo, dove il transito dei pellegrini era pressoché ininterrotto.
My translation: "The name of 'banchi' .... referred to the benches at which shopkeepers, bankers, notaries, writers and merchants of all kinds carried out their businesses, taking advantage [in these streets] of the vicinity of St Peters and Ponte Sant'Angelo, where the transit of pilgrims was nearly constant."
===
... 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's the key bit:
Il nome di "Banchi", esteso alla zona che comprende anche le attuali via dei Banchi Nuovi e via del Banco di S.Spirito, si riferiva, appunto, ai banchi dove negozianti, banchieri, notai, scrivani e mercanti di ogni genere esercitavano i loro affari, sfruttando la vicinanza di S.Pietro e di ponte S.Angelo, dove il transito dei pellegrini era pressoché ininterrotto.
My translation: "The name of 'banchi' .... referred to the benches at which shopkeepers, bankers, notaries, writers and merchants of all kinds carried out their businesses, taking advantage [in these streets] of the vicinity of St Peters and Ponte Sant'Angelo, where the transit of pilgrims was nearly constant."
[Wonderful essay on banks by a Genovese historian of banks, here. Actually a history of the birth of the modern. Read just the first paragraph, if not more, for gobsmacking perspective on the world.]
===
... 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.
Fabulous peregrinations! I like the pic with small dog, stripey costumed half of couple and SHADOWS...very The Third Man ;)
ReplyDelete