"Genoa is like a mother to me. It is where I learned to live. It gave birth to me and raised me until I was thirty-five years old: and that is no small thing, in fact, it is perhaps almost everything. Today, it seems to me that Genoa has the face of all the poor devils I met in its carruggi, the outcasts I would later find in Sardinia, the “graziose” of Via del Campo."