Liguria has its own beat. You can hear it everywhere, on the land, in the mountains, and in the sea. Liguria is discreet, welcoming but not over the board, generous but not wasteful, direct but not into your face, traditional, and of course antique.
For an outsider Liguria is and will always be a great place for tourism, offering what is every tourist can desire and wish for on a very much thought after vacation. To understand this land and its culture, it`s people you must live here, or should I say, at least should live here to experience Liguria the way “Ligurians” do, and still even after that one will still be wondering about this an incredible region of Italy, a place of an incredible history that changed the world we are living in today.
The path is not easy. You should…no, you must speak the language, understand the idioms, and catch the meaning of gestures (which are an integral part of Ligurian culture and everyday life). Liguria has it own culture, not to mention that every town of this region has it own culture (microculture within the culture so to speak). The trust must be earned, much like respect. Despite of the modernization of every part of Italian life, Liguria is faithful to its tradition of “inner circle” composed of family members and close friends, whose ties go back generations. For an outsider its almost a miracle to become a part of a family, but the task is not impossible, and perhaps the pathway to become one of them can be quite enlightened, considering that you must excel in history, literature, art, politics, economics, and master the language….oops, forgetting one more thing-dialect. The dialect “genovese” has a lovely sound, much like french, although all of the Ligurians say that french was invented after their famous dialect.
And at this point I am only scratching the surface. The food is a completely separate topic, which I will be addressing in my subsequent posts, since its such an important part tradition and history, and I would not want to miss a chance to present it with an outmost care and attention. After living in Liguria for almost 15 months due to pandemic, I was able to see Liguria in a completely different light. The region offers and incredible quality of life, nature, ecology, quality of food (zero-kilometer is not a joke here, its actually real). There is no such a thing as bad weather, there are different seasons, and when you live in a place between the sea and the mountains, and every sunset is different, and the sound of the sea nearby bring a new story every day as long as you willing to listen. Its true everything comes with work and learning curve, but isn`t what life is?
