AUTHOR REFLECTION
When Genoa Chose Me
Some places don’t welcome you. They simply wait until you’re ready to hear them.
Some places don’t welcome you. They simply wait until you’re ready to hear them.
There is a version of this story that sounds much more dramatic than the truth.
It would begin with loss. With change. With uncertainty. It would explain why I left, what I was searching for, and everything that felt impossible at the time.
But that isn’t the story I want to tell.
The truth is quieter.
I arrived in Genoa carrying six small hands in mine.
My children were too young to understand how much life had changed, yet old enough to notice that everything was different.
New streets.
New schools.
New routines.
New fears.
When you’re responsible for someone else’s sense of safety, you don’t have the luxury of falling apart.
You simply keep walking.
So I did.
Every day, after work or after school, we wandered through the city together.
Sometimes without a destination.
Sometimes following the smell of the sea.
Sometimes because staying indoors felt heavier than climbing another hill.
Children have a wonderful way of discovering a city.
They don’t look for monuments.
They look for cats sleeping in the sun.
For strange doors.
For colourful boats.
For hidden staircases.
For shells left behind by the tide.
Following them, I stopped trying to understand Genoa as a visitor.
I began discovering it as a mother.
The city slowly became part of our daily life.
The old woman who always smiled at the bakery.
The fisherman repairing his nets before sunrise.
The same café where we stopped on rainy afternoons.
The narrow alley where our footsteps echoed louder than our voices.
The sea was always there.
Sometimes calm.
Sometimes restless.
Always patient.
I never thought of it as something extraordinary.
It simply became part of our days.
Only much later did I realise it had also become part of me.
Looking back, I think the sea taught me something I desperately needed to learn.
Not everything heals quickly.
The tide doesn’t erase the shoreline overnight.
It returns.
Again.
And again.
Always changing the landscape by almost invisible degrees.
Healing can be like that.
Not dramatic.
Not immediate.
Just faithful.
There were mornings when I sat facing the harbour before the city fully woke.
People hurried to work.
Ferries prepared to leave.
Seagulls argued over breakfast.
Life continued, indifferent to the storms inside each of us.
Oddly enough, that indifference felt comforting.
The sea wasn’t trying to fix me.
It wasn’t offering answers.
It simply reminded me that movement exists even when we cannot feel it.
Years later, when I began writing The Tide Chronicles, I realised I wasn’t inventing a world.
I was writing about a feeling I had carried for a long time without knowing its name.
The feeling that certain places see us more honestly than people sometimes do.
That some cities don’t ask who you used to be.
They simply ask who you’re becoming.
Perhaps that’s why the novel is filled with water, silence, forgotten streets and old stones.
Those weren’t literary choices.
They were memories.
Real ones.
Every chapter carries something that belongs to Genoa.
Not always literally.
Sometimes it’s only a smell.
A colour.
The sound of rain against ancient walls.
A staircase climbed while holding two little hands.
A quiet afternoon watching ships disappear beyond the horizon.
These moments never appear exactly as they happened.
Stories transform reality.
But they never grow from nothing.
People often imagine writers searching for inspiration.
I never did.
I simply paid attention.
To the city.
To my children laughing in places that had once felt unfamiliar.
To mornings when hope arrived so quietly I almost failed to recognise it.
To evenings when the sea reflected a sky that looked too beautiful for ordinary days.
Eventually I understood something.
I hadn’t chosen Genoa because I wanted to write a novel.
Genoa had quietly become the place where I learned to breathe differently.
The novel came afterwards.
Like the tide.
Slowly.
Without asking permission.
If The Tide Chronicles has a soul, it isn’t because I imagined one.
It’s because this city, at a time when I needed it most, reminded me that beginnings don’t always arrive with certainty.
Sometimes they arrive as whispers carried by the sea.
And if you listen long enough…
They become stories.