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this makes me very happy. And then the pavement. This alley isn’t paved with the large blocks of gray granite you get everywhere in Genoa, but with cobblestones as big as a fist. You can’t walk on them. There’s a strip of navigable road laid with narrow bricks on their sides. Half of them have sunk or come loose. There hasn’t been any maintenance here since the early Middle Ages. And then that name. Who in the world wouldn’t want to stroll along Vico Amandorla? It’s a name that smells like a promise, as soft as marzipan, as mature as liquor in forgotten casks, in the cellar of a faraway monastery where the last monk died twenty yearsago one afternoon with an innocent child’s prayer on his lips in the cloister gardens, in the shadow of an almond tree, as happy as a man after a rich dinner with dear friends. Say the name quietly if you are afraid and you won’t be afraid anymore: Vico Amandorla.
    From Piazza Negri you can walk, during museum opening hours, through the cloister gardens of Sant’Agostino to Piazza Sarzano and the city walls. The passage through the cloister is triangular, undoubtedly as an architectonic compromise with exceptional topographical circumstances. The tip points toward the tower, which is sprinkled with colorful mosaics that clash with the strict and sober gray of the cloister. What’s the statement? What must the monks who wore away the pavement of the cloister passage with their footsteps have thought at the sight of their own festive tower? That it was Mardi Gras outside? That the gray life in the cloister clashed with that path upwards to heaven, a path as garish and variegated as a rocket, ready to be fired so that it can burst out into a cascade of colors?
    Piazza Sarzano is a square that I still don’t really get, a square like a formless mollusk with a Metro station I never see anyone going into or coming out of. But just to the right of it, left of the church, is a secret passageway to another city—a medieval wormhole. With its profound and contented pavement, the street swings steeply up the hill to a forgotten and abandoned mountain village straight out of Umbria or Abruzzo. A handful of narrow, abandoned little streets that rise and fall around a shell-shaped village square that slumbers in the sunshine. But in the distance you don’t see any mountaintops, no hills crosshatched with vines, no goatherds, but the docks of Genoa. This is a magical place you cannot be inwithout realizing that you actually can’t be there because the place cannot exist. This is Campo Pisano, a perfect name euphonically, an ideal marriage between sound and rhythm. Its meter is the triumphant final chord of a heroic verse. The name fits perfectly after the bucolic diaeresis of the dactylic hexameter. The succession of a bi-syllabic and tri-syllabic obeys the Gesetz der wachsenden Glieder and creates a charming auslaut after the first unmarked element of the dactyl, by which an ideal alternation between a falling and a rising rhythm arises. The sound is carried by the open vowels that shine like the three primary colors on an abstract painting by Mondrian. The falling movement from the a to the o finds a playful counterpoint in the high i before it is repeated.
    The cool hard consonants articulate the composition like the black lines on the same painting, with the racy repetition of the p right in the middle. It is a name like an incantation to evoke a magical abode. A spell of otherworldly sophistication is needed to bring to life an impossible place. If someone were to unscrew the street’s nameplate from the wall, Campo Pisano would vanish into the mists of the docks, only to reappear when an ancient high priest remembered the name and it passed through his wrinkly lips between the Barbarossa walls and the sea. Campo Pisano. It’s a happy place with a tragic past, in the same way that only people who have known pain can be happy because