I got here before the light was fully committed. That moment when the sky is still deciding what color it wants to be, and the harbor is so flat it looks like someone laid glass over it. The houses, those pinks and yellows and that one burnt orange that every photographer on earth has already shot, they were doubled in the water. Upside down and somehow more honest that way.
There was one fisherman. Old hands, no hurry. He was pulling in nets with a rhythm that made me think of my nonno sorting bolts in his workshop in Milan. That same patience. That same silence that isn’t empty, it’s full. The nets smelled like salt and something green, algae maybe, and the rope made a wet slapping sound against the stone that I could feel in my teeth.
I sat on the edge of the pier with my legs hanging over. The stone was cold through my linen pants and still damp from the night. My camera sat next to me, cap on. I thought about shooting but the light was doing something I knew the film wouldn’t catch. Not exactly. There are mornings like that. The real image lives in your body, in the cool air on your ankles and the coffee you haven’t had yet and the particular way your breathing slows without you deciding to slow it.
By nine this place will be a different country. The boats will come, the voices will layer over each other in six languages, someone will fly a drone. I don’t resent it. I’ve been that tourist. But there’s a Vernazza that only exists at 8:41 in the morning, and it belongs to the fisherman and whoever else bothered to set an alarm. Today that was me. Basta così.
