PLACE & MEMORY
Why Genoa?
Every story belongs to a place before it belongs to an author.
Every story belongs to a place before it belongs to an author.
People often ask why I chose Genoa.
The truth is, I don’t think I did.
When I first arrived here, I wasn’t looking for inspiration. I wasn’t searching for the setting of a novel, or for forgotten legends, or for hidden mythology waiting to be rediscovered.
I was simply trying to begin again.
Life has a way of changing direction without asking for permission. Mine did, and suddenly I found myself in a city I barely knew, with two children beside me and the quiet hope that somewhere, somehow, we would learn to feel at home again.
At first, Genoa felt distant.
Unlike many Italian cities, it doesn’t reveal itself immediately. It doesn’t charm you with grand piazzas or effortless beauty. It asks something different. It asks for patience.
You have to walk.
You have to get lost.
You have to climb stairways that seem to lead nowhere, wander through alleyways so narrow they almost erase the sky, and follow the smell of salt until you find yourself standing in front of the sea without quite remembering how you got there.
Little by little, the city begins to speak.
Not loudly.
Never loudly.
Genoa whispers.
Every morning, I found myself returning to the harbour. Sometimes with my children. Sometimes alone. I watched ferries disappear beyond the horizon while fishermen quietly untangled their nets. The lighthouse stood in the distance, exactly where it had stood for centuries, watching generations arrive, leave, love, grieve and begin again.
There was something comforting about its permanence.
While everything in my life seemed uncertain, the sea continued its ancient rhythm.
The tide came in.
The tide went out.
Every single day.
Without fail.
It reminded me that movement isn’t always visible. Sometimes change happens quietly, one wave at a time.
As I explored the city, I began to notice something else.
Genoa doesn’t wear its history on the surface.
It hides it.
Behind weathered doors.
Inside forgotten churches.
Beneath layers of stone polished by countless footsteps.
In abandoned courtyards where silence feels older than memory itself.
There are places where the air changes for reasons you can’t explain. Streets where sunlight only visits for a few minutes each day. Corners where the sea is invisible, yet you can still smell it.
Those places found their way into the novel long before I consciously decided to write about them.
I didn’t create the atmosphere of The Tide Chronicles.
I borrowed it.
The city had already written it.
All I did was listen.
As the story grew, I realised something that surprised even me.
The sea wasn’t just part of the landscape.
It had become a language.
Water remembers.
Stone remembers.
Even silence remembers.
That idea slowly became the emotional heart of the novel.
The fantasy came later.
The relics.
The Shadows.
The mythology.
All of those elements grew from a much simpler question:
What if places remembered everything we choose to forget?
Perhaps that’s why the novel could only happen here.
Genoa is a city built between mountain and sea, between departure and return, between light and shadow. It has always been a place of sailors, merchants, pilgrims and people searching for another beginning.
In many ways, I became one of them.
Walking these streets changed not only the story I was writing, but the way I looked at stories altogether.
I stopped asking how to invent worlds.