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ostentatiously has far too many friends, as the saying goes. The saying is a bit different from that, but you understand what I’m saying. Do you understand what I’m saying? You have to learn how to behave in this city. It’s a porcelain grotto.”
    â€œI think I can only see the exterior,” I say. Only then did the waitress turn around. She asked us whether we might like something to eat. She asked it coolly, unapproachably, and proud, like someone with a countess in her family, like the marble duchess herself—La Superba.
    10.
    If I think about these notes, my friend, and think about how I’ll turn them into a novel someday, a novel that needs to be carried along by a protagonist who will sing himself free from me and insist on the right to his or her own name, experiences, and downfall in exchange for my personal confrontation with my new city, which is more like a triumphal tour than a tragic course towardinevitable failure—and, on the grounds of that alone, is not suitable material for a great book—then I think about how crucial it will be to make tangible sense of the feeling of happiness that this city has given me time after time, even if only as a sparkling prelude to the punches of fate. Happiness, I say. I realize you could no longer repress a giggle when I said that. I realize that it’s strange to hear such a weak and hackneyed word come out of my mouth. Happiness is something for lovers before they have their first fight, for girls in floral dresses at the seaside who don’t see the jellyfish and the ptomaines, or for an old man with a photo album who can no longer really tell the difference between the past and the present. Happiness is basically a temporary illusion without any profundity, style, or class. The candy floss of emotions. And yet, for lack of a better word, I feel happy in Genoa, in a golden yellow, slow, permanent way. Not like candy floss, but like good glass. Not like a carnival, but like a primeval forest. Not like the clash of cymbals, but a symphony.
    It is also remarkable, or I daresay unbelievable, that happiness is dependent upon location, on longitude and latitude, city limits, pavement, and street names. I’ve read enough philosophy, both Western and Eastern, to realize that wisdom dictates you should laugh at me and dismiss my sensation as an aberrance. So be it. That’s the point. The more I think about it as I write these words, the more I become convinced of the importance of putting into words this impossible, undesirable, unbelievable feeling of happiness.
    Street names and pavement. That’s the way I formulated it. In the first instance as a stylistic device, of course, sketched with therough sprezzatura that characterizes my writing. But in the second instance, it’s true, too. I’ll give you an example: Vico Amandorla can make me so happy. It’s an insignificant alleyway that runs from Vico Vegetti to Stradone Sant’Agostino. It’s a short stretch, and you don’t encounter anything of any importance along the way. The alleyway isn’t even pretty, at least not in the conventional manner. Normal, ugly old houses and normal, smelly old trash. But the alley curves up the hill like a snake. A little old lady struggles uphill in the opposite direction. The alley is actually too steep, built wrongly centuries and centuries ago or just sprung into existence in a very awkward manner. The alley is pointless, too. You come out too far down, below the Piazza Negri. If you want to be there, at San Donato, it’s much better to just take Vico Vegetti downhill and then turn right along Via San Bernardo. That’s faster and more convenient. And if you want to be in the higher part of the Stradone Sant’Agostino, at Piazza Sarzano, it’s much quicker and more convenient to follow the same Vico Vegetti in the other direction, past the Facoltà di Architettura straight to Piazza Negri. All of