Creuza de mâ

In Genoese, a creuza de mâ is a mule track by the sea: one of the narrow lanes that wind down between high walls towards the water. It is also the title of Fabrizio De André’s album, sung entirely in the old dialect of the city.

As with X-Plore, I was out with two friends, Davide Lucchini and Mark Cooper, this time in the “caruggi” of Genoa’s old town, near the port. Between the 1960s and the 1980s these were some of the most dangerous streets in the city, full of drug dealing and prostitution. A little of that feeling is still there, but now it shares the lanes with bars and restaurants, graffiti and murals, old shrines and new colours: traditions and centuries of history pressed right up against each other.

Those stark contrasts are what I tried to hold on to, and I pushed the colours hard in the edit to match them. Davide, one of my best friends and a wonderful street photographer, kept his trusty Ricoh GR on the people who live in these narrow streets. Mark, whose own work is abstract, built on macro and aerial photography, spent most of the walk close to the walls, looking for textures: the kind that could be found anywhere along these streets, if you stop long enough to see them.