I am walking through the forced silence of this city.
If I had all the keys to each of its doors and gates, it would be possible to go down to the port or up the hills from any point only by entering and exiting its buildings.
In this apparent chaos of houses on top of each other, linear and declared passages along with tortuous and hidden shortcuts, stairs and elevators, walls, embankments and gardens, here and there we recognize repetitions, constant references; all scattered a little everywhere as a widespread attitude, as the manifestation of a superior entity that tries to keep all things together. Without apparent rules, this city has a system, almost like mycorrhizae, an invisible net connecting public and private spaces, an infinite path made of sharing and protection, security and adventures, reviving the ancient human dream of the Labyrinth. A maze to reclaim the dream.
This is a place where unevenness, historical accumulations and social stratifications have produced a unique and unrepeatable system of connections and paths between empty and full spaces, a mutant system in constant and dizzying equilibrium. A spontaneous and reactive urbanity.
Almost like a living being, this city reacts to dangers. It selected new evolutionary strategies in order to survive a urban planning made only by discipline of rules and control, it has had to change its DNA. Reworking an ancient character in an unexpected but necessary way, it has independently developed those gestures capable of improving its survival.
At 11.36 am on 14 August 2018, under an incessant rain, a deafening roar ripped through the city of Genoa, forever erasing a very important stretch of the Ligurian city traffic and a piece of the history of Italian engineering from the highway maps: the "Morandi Bridge" collapsed taking with it 43 victims. It was a tragedy for the city itself and for the entire country. On 3 august 2020 the new bridge designed by the architect Renzo Piano was inaugurated after a record building rush.
This project is an imaginary journey through the other invisible bridges of Genoa that still hold the city together, those without any name or author which also reach the roofs: obvious or hidden communication lanes that end up being characterized as aerial caruggi, perhaps panoramic. They are examples of spontaneous architecture, sometimes wild and even a little anarchic planning, expressions of the best Italian art of getting by, but which have become a unique feature of a fatally "vertical" city. This is a tribute to the walkways of Genoa, suspended in the void and clinging to the buildings, which reveals endless real and imaginary cities held together by the unique character of this community.