The smile of Columbus

As promised one and a half year ago, I prepared a short report from my travel to Genoa Italy in June 2012.

Two hours ago I finished the revision of my paper The Playhouses of the Midddle Ages, for the conference’s proceedings, to appear next months, edited by Lenke Kovács and Tiziano Pacchiarotti in the series «RICERCHE INTERMEDIEVALI».

The work has refreshed my memories of the beautiful city and its Mediterranean sphere. This looks like the last opportunity to show some photos in reasonable distance from the time they were made.

I made earlier a marginal mention of a theater performance based on the ship journal of Magellan’s companion Pigafetta.

I’m think two further reflections are worth bothering my innocent readers.

The first is going to be a story from the series The smile of… In two of them I told about unexpected coincidences between my life’s events.

Here starts the photo-story about a smile of Columbus. My first contribution to the

Weekly Writing Challenge: Multimedia Storytelling

_)_   _)_  _)_  _)_  _)_

The smile of Columbus

I saw the monument of this famous seafarer 150 years after erecting

The impressive anchor will be mentioned in the next Genoa-story telling about the galleon I saw in the seaport).

The figure of the hero is based on a column standing on a big pedestal. The latter has the dedication

A

Cristoforo Colombo

La Patria

It is richly decorated with reliefs. They depict Columbus in dispute with scholars about the chances of a sea travel to India moving westwards around the Earth, not taking the obvious eastern direction.

In a way it was a choice between the life on land and moving towards the unknown space.

And see, the two options are metaphorically represented on the pedestal respectively by a wild plant growing in a corner (left side),

and by a dove (la colomba!) sitting on the opposite.

Sitting, but only for a while, and determined to move on after having listened to the arguments pro et contra.

© A. Dąbrówka 2013, photos 2012