La mia piccola gita a Genova (My little trip to Genoa)

(Piazza de Ferrari--Genova)

I once heard that house dust is 75% human skin. Keep that in mind. It’ll come up later as I describe my weekend trip to Genoa, (called Genova in Italian) located just east of the Italian Riviera.

I left Saturday on an early afternoon train from Florence’s Santa Maria Novella Station. Three hours later, after an hour long stop in Pisa—during which I regrettably didn’t have the time to cross the town to see the tower—I was in Genova.

Genova is unlike any city I have ever seen, which I guess isn’t really saying too much because every city I’ve been to thus far is unlike any city I have ever seen. The streets are narrow and labyrinth like and the buildings are tall—at night every street downtown, in every direction, looks like a dark and foreboding alley. I was only able to keep my bearings walking in this maze by knowing where I was in relation to Genova Harbor, where I sat on a bench for about half an hour watching schools of fish pass just beneath the surface of the water.

I went to dinner close to the harbor, just before the storm hit. The restaurant was elevated from the city street and I had to climb a flight of stairs to greet the man who stood in the doorway. He stood there with his apron on looking at the harbor, or maybe something just past it, and I had to ask him if indeed the restaurant was open. He said that it was and he led me to my seat in a restaurant that had three separate tiers. The entryway was in the center tier and I descended a small flight of stairs to go to the bottom. There were three people in the entire restaurant, the man who led me to my seat and then took my order, his wife in the kitchen separated from my dinning area by a cloth curtain, and myself. In all three tiers I’d say there were about twenty-five tables, all of them set, and all of them clientless. The man took my order, and was crafty in getting me to order more than I originally intended, but he was nice enough and had a grandfatherly feel about him. The place was decorated with paintings of ocean scenes with ships at sea, fruit baskets spilling their cornucopia, and the Virgin Mary.

I ordered a half liter of the house red wine, ravioli with meat ragu, and a salad. He leaned behind the curtain and shouted my order to his wife in the kitchen who then clattered pans and said something in dialect that I couldn’t understand. The steak was delicious and so was the ragu, very simple but good. I was going to finish only with an espresso but when I saw the rain outside I figured I’d stay for a little longer—in the end I had two espressos and a tiramisu. About halfway done with the tiramisu they get a second client. When I left it was still raining, but I was given a map and directions on the best way to return to my hotel room and still stay relatively dry.

And it worked, most of the way back to my hotel room was under cover of portico and by the time I was on the street of the hotel the rain had stopped.

Now a little about my hotel: Finding this place was the first thing I did when I arrived in Genova, but it has struck me that my process of finding a hotel may be drastically different than yours. I look for the biggest dump possible. I don’t care about little comforts. I don’t need a chocolate on my pillow or a turn down service. I am quite content without a continental breakfast. What I need is to pay as little as possible for a clean simple room so that I can rationalize my way to making impulse buys like gelato and wine. So having done this, I found a place called, “Hotel della Posta” literally, “Hotel of the Place,” and walked into the sparse lobby where a bearded man in his fifties was sitting at the reception and watching the T.V. show, “Monk,” dubbed in Italian. I asked him if there were any single rooms for the night. He said that—as luck would have it—he had one left. I gave him forty Euros, my passport, and he filled out the paperwork with my name, residence, and room number. He gave me back my passport along with a key and the television remote. I went up to my room which was about a third of the size of my room in Florence and had a shower stall and a sink conveniently placed about a meter away from the foot of the bed. Shower, sink and bed all in one room, a bathroom and bedroom all in one! There was no toilet though—it is never a good idea to shit where you sleep.

When I had first checked in I had taken a shower and then watched an episode of some MTV reality show with Italian subtitles while wondering if this were the only window other countries had to America they would think our lives are full of promiscuous sex and drunken fighting. And that’s it. Punto e Basta.

When I came back after dinner it was only to get my umbrella and venture out once again into the great unknown. My venturing was short and uneventful aside from the stinging feeling that in one of these dark winding streets lurked some sort of danger. But Freddie Kruger never jumped out from behind the bend to chop me up into little bits. In fact, the biggest excitement of the evening was the spotting of a mouse, which I histrionically identified originally as a rat, which scurried from behind a trashcan and into a gutter. I went by the Piazza de Ferrari, shown above courtesy of Wikipedia, and bought a Guinness at a bar. I did some people watching while sipping my Guinness and eventually sauntered back to my home away from home away from home…

Those of you who have never lived with me, which is most of you, wouldn’t know about the obsessive compulsive way in which I clean my sheets, punctually, every week. I've heard that dust is 75% human skin, leaving the other 25% up to dirt, pollen, various fibrous material, and… DUST MITES along with their feces. These dust mites feast on the organic matter in dust—your skin—and like most living things excrete waste. This waste is an extreme allergen and if you’re allergic to dust this is probably the culprit.

I slid my hand across my sheets before going to bed and I noticed they were slightly grainy. Fresh sheets are not grainy. As I tried to go to sleep the only thing I could think about was how I was practically bathing in the dead skin and dust mites of whoever slept here before me. I got out of bed the next day with the familiar feeling that I must have slept at some point because I wasn’t tired, but I couldn’t recall when.

Now that I was up and checking out of the hotel, I figured there was no harm in looking in the drawers… just to see what I’d find. The top drawer of the night stand had five hairs mixed with a grey/black dust that looked like a mixture of cigarette ashes and peeled black paint. One of the hairs had the appearance of coming from a different part of the human anatomy than the head. I stopped my investigation there.

After I checked out of the hotel I wondered around with my laptop bag bulging with dirty clothes, toiletries, and a notebook filled with homework; I knew none of this homework would get done but brought it along for the trip anyway with good intentions. I went outside the city center, beyond the city walls, and up to a height from which I could see a large portion of the city. The first skyscrapers I’ve seen in Italy have been in Genova. I remember seeing only two. For the most part the narrow streets curl together as storefronts and homes with clothes lines hanging outside the windows. These streets are dotted with beautiful churches made of marble, many of which are painted with frescoes. I walked back down to the city center, made my way to one of those churches where they were just finishing mass, walked inside, and listened to the closing prayer. When it was done I returned to the Piazza de Ferrari where I ate a croissant and drank a cappuccino while listening to my iPod and watching the people pass. I walked around a bit more, eventually got a gelato and then returned to the train station. I had to wait an hour for the train and the, “coming back” took nearly twice as long as the, “getting there.”
And there it is. Punto e Basta, last weekend’s trip to Genova.


From Italy, “Buona Giornata.”