The Genovese Rhapsody

How do you really make a portrait of a city? This is a question I have been asking myself for quite a while and since the question itself grows from the mix of two of my deepest passions (photography and travel), its answer sometimes changes depending of the city itself and the connection I establish with it. In a visit to Genova (Italy) an answer to that question made itself visible in the multiple corners of the city, thanks to the different layers of advertising posters covering the infinite walls and streets that move around her like a chaotically organized diagram; each poster not only talking about the different aspects of the place and its inhabitants (socially, politically, historically, musically, etc, etc), but acting too as a metaphor of the different cultural layers that compose an urb of such size and history. Once one of the main entrances to the “Old World”, Genova shows us the fingerprints of human history printed in every block, door and streets like many other crossroads points between old and new worlds do. Still today, the whole area boils with the mixed kind of cultural heritage that at the same time gives it its own and unique identity. The identity of a place deeply cosmopolitan but still rooted on its European stage setting of which is part of. Step by step and block by block I found the compositions that today you see here, and while standing in front of them I could not avoid to create in my mind a mirrored image of what it was in front of me and what was behind, where the overwhelming (but still pleasant) cacophony that covers the air with music, sounds, and voices added to the smells that float in every corner and the constant flashing of images that make you look, stop, and look again making each step a discovery, the discovery of the constant beauty of a place where people from all corners of the world has added their little piece of identity in top of each other, creating a whole and turning Genova into a massive and generous treasure. A feast for the senses. F. Martín Morante