Genoa, the historic center is not a nocturnal amusement park: those who really love it come to live there – Primocanale.it
When I had to move to Genoa for work, almost thirty years ago, I chose the alleys because I had fallen in love with them when I was at university, when sometimes I stopped to sleep in a house in via San Donato, the one where the architrave above the door reads “Pervia Caeli”, on one floor very high without a lift, overlooking what was then an artificial lunar crater left by Anglo-American bombs and today has become the Luzzati Gardens. It was a choice made easier by the proximity to the workplace, I went and came back on foot, I was only sorry to have to sell the car, I was fond of it as a person but I could not even afford the costs of a garage since where I live is a bit like Venice and my neighbor on the landing, park her car, if it suits you, in Corso Podestà. But in fact I live there, I took up residence, it’s not that I come there one or two nights a week to splash around, I wouldn’t have done it even when I wasn’t pathetic for age, on the contrary I go home that I can’t wait to throw myself bed and so when I have to where to go to drink I answer boh.
Not to be old-fashioned, which in theory, alas, can now be used even if it is said today who thrives, but it is not that I like very much that the alleys written by the (rare) Genoese youth only for a few hours, only for a few days or better night of the week. The concept of “movida”, apart from the word horrible, is in fact a kind of territorial contempt: why don’t you make a bit of a shack even in Castelletto, in San Teodoro, in San Fruttuoso, in the Porto Antico which is beautifully large, in corso Italia which at night is perhaps even more suggestive than during the day?
And then, to those who take the most ancient and beautiful part of the city as a sballodromo without rules or almost, I just say: do you like alleys? So come and live there, earn it, learn to really love them. Buy us a house, looking good it is good, or let your parents buy it, or even try to rent it for a while. So maybe on the one hand you would understand how beautiful they are not only in artificial light, those alleys where you come to stun yourself, because especially if you have to gasoline you can without rain here where there are still cafes and creameries and shops and groceries and shops to be blown away. open, in short, it is not a nocturnal outlet with fake houses where no one lives, the houses are real and inside there are real people, who at night try to scrape some quiet from insomnia. And so it is not that he gets excited if at three o’clock they parade under the windows barking for that dirty song, among other saddened ones, which is reserved for recent graduates focusing on the conclusion of the digestive system. Try to live them seriously, you would fall in love with them as it happened to me.
It is said that nightlife is the antidote to decay, but for some time – I say this as a resident, who the next morning finds the vestiges of revelry despite the admirable work of the nocturnal garbage collectors – something seems to prove the opposite: certainly the idea of a part of the city condemned to live is unpleasant. accordion, from Thursday to Saturday the nocturnal amusement park of people who arrive from the rest of the city, from neighborhoods where one would not dare to leave the rumenta where it happens and to sing at the top of one’s voice or at least to cackle almost at dawn. I’m not leaving here, I can’t afford it and by now I feel at home, but it bothers me that fellow citizens, young people or many who believe they still are, treat my neighborhood like the girl from the first counter “the prettiest the most idiot “of Venditti’s song: one to hang out with when the girlfriend at home, who your parents like more than you, is elsewhere. Here, I repeat myself, is a Venice with the sea only in front and not inside: for the good, because you can breathe history and vestiges of a remote majesty and the cars and their noise practically do not exist; bad, because like the Serenissima it is becoming a theme park, people who come only to say that they have been there without understanding anything. But on the other hand it is also true that sometimes someone outside asks me where the house of the artist, of the cantor of the last ones is, and then I have to show it to him with the map of the telephone, and when he has seen it he asks me if be a joke. It’s an old misconception, the old city.