[ Irish KC ]
Kansas City Irish Festivals, Music, Pubs, & Events by an Artist in Ireland

One of the reasons I haven’t brought you pictures and words of this trip to Italy is because I forgot to bring a cable for my camera with me.

So I have pictures; I just can’t share them with you - yet.

Actually I can’t even share them with me, as my camera is a simple affair that doesn’t have the capability to show you what you’ve taken. I love the surprise when you finally get around to connecting it to the computer and finding out what you really did take.

Genoa is the sort of city that you could take photos in every day for years and be far from finished. And that’s just of the obvious stuff, the carvings over doors and windows, the painted walls, the ornate churches and palaces.

Oh yeah, and the sea and the mountains.

I’m staying in a building with 13th century marble columns. The staircase to the apartment makes you gasp. Every day. And it’s not bad that I put a key into a 5 foot wide ornate metal door every day. So far I haven’t found any angles that work for photos of them. I might have to resort to painting.

By a fountain inside a palace today, and again later on street littered with north African shops, I wondered how you could photograph a smell. I eventually decided not to try.

But of course just the walls and windows would keep me going forever. And I’ll confess to taking a few of walls already. I may yet even spend one entire day taking photographs of just walls. I may.

And the absence of walls, the gaps that are streets in name, the improbably narrow slits through which the sun blasts through to illuminate a thousand squares. Every time I walk down a street that is just a few feet wide from building to building I imagine my son with me touching both sides at the same time. This is not America.

I took a lift to day, from one part of town to another. It was like getting on the tube in London, except when you got off you were in a competely different city, one that floats above the one you’ve just spent hours walking around.

The last lift is at midnight I’m told. A different take on missing the last bus home is the alternative, a staircase that must surely test your calves. I took a funicular railway down again.

The only buskers I’ve seen all play the accordion. I presume it’s a different accordion, and not that they’re sharing. The churches have a tardis feel. Somehow they are squeezed into tiny squares and the surrounding buildings being so close seem to make the size of the fresco covered inside impossibly large.

Today I looked in a shop window with the most elaborate presentation of olives I’ve seen. Orante arrangements of green and black olives. Except they weren’t real olives. This was a dessert shop. I was looking at fake olives made of chocolate. No I didn’t buy any - I can’t stand chocolate.

I took a photograph of St Brigid today. Well I didn’t; I took a photograph of a load of steps and an arch, and then I found out that St Brigid was in there too. I’ll probably get around to snapping Daniel O’Connell’s monument also.

This morning I went out to draw. But I didn’t. It wasn’t that I didn’t see anything I wanted to draw; it’s that I didn’t see anything I didn’t want to draw. I couldn’t stop walking. The nearest I came to stopping was being held up by a couple of tour parties in off the cruise ships. Tomorrow I plan to make myself stop.

You’d love the walls here. Really, you would. Shutters on the windows. Shades of yellows and orange. And grey. I love shades of grey. Glimpses of brick, and arches. I could spend a year painting here and not dent what I’d want to do. And that’s without lifting a brush. A year of staring at walls.

I’m so happy looking at the walls here that it hurts.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 8:59 pm and is filed under 1-eolai, Meanderings, Travel. You can follow responses via my RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.