Frankfurt, the City of Contrasts

     The etymology of the city’s name traces back to the Germanic tribe of the Franks, where the word “furt”, meaning “ford” (the part where the river is shallow enough to be crossed on foot), suggests that Frankfurt am Main originates as “the ford of the Franks on the Main”. A label that nowadays might not entirely suit the profile of the largest financial center in continental Europe.  In fact, home to the European Central Bank and one of the world’s largest stock exchanges by market capitalization, Frankfurt is considered a global city (alpha world city) and hosts 14 out of Germany’s 15 skyscrapers. Its skyline, rare in Europe and unique in Germany, has earned it the nickname of “Mainhattan”, a portmanteau of the local Main river and Manhattan.

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Psychological Anosognosia

As we adjust the chips and wires to try and make our online identities please the social audience’s expectations, as we try to cope with the standard, the conventional, the general struggle for perfection, we tend to have no time to admit failure or weakness. We cannot show it or openly talk about it until, at some point, as some part of our nature deteriorates under the pressure of the stressing habits we impose to it, we end up tricking ourselves into believing that everything is fine.

But then in the chance to widen one´s own perspectives through travels and in the uncorrupted genuine flow of the creative mind, I see the most efficient protest against this psychological anosognosia of our times.

*Anosognosia is a neurological condition (not a psychological one. Allow me the poetic license). The word derives from the Greek nosos, “disease”, and gnosis, “knowledge”, and denotes the inability to acknowledge disease in oneself. Imagine, for example, the victim of a major stroke having the left side of the body entirely paralyzed and yet being completely oblivious of the problem. To the question “How do you feel?”, the patient unable to move even a single muscle in the left part of the body would reply with a sincere “Fine”.

Speicherstadt, Hamburg

 

     I’ve always liked to think that all the faces and the places we accidentally glance at on our way to anywhere must stay deep at the bottom of our eyes. That even if our memory can’t contain information about all those noses, the mouths, the buildings’ facades we have seen, they still inhabit some inaccessible unconscious place. I like to think my smile lives on somewhere in the eyes of the red-haired toddler who stared at me on the metro, in those of the old lady disapprovingly looking at my phone as I was crossing the street, in the shiny blue irises of the banker who just helped me pay my rent. And I like, at times, to challenge that forgetfulness and move those places and faces we randomly get to see, move them into a space where they can consciously affect our perceptions and ideas. So I adjust shutter speed and aperture, and shoot.

The Bridging Tree

     A Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide version of nature spotted in the Außenalster Park in Hamburg. A nice remainder of the fights in which different facets of our personality constantly engage. Busy in the struggle we can’t but lose the greenish hope of our leaves, too blind to see the bridge, right there, inviting the contenders to meet halfway.

Once upon a Mainz

on Gutenberg Universität Campus

     “We all are storytellers”, Thomas drank the last sip of his Kupferberg, “we have always been. And life is a tale vaguely based on a real story. But now each and every one of us can have his or her voice heard by an audience”. We left the Kirschgarten and its typically German half-timbered buildings to go to Liebfrauen square, in the proximity of the imposing Mainzer Dom. It wasn’t an ordinary day in the  small state capital of Rhineland-Palatinate. On a stage, a group of men in historical costumes was filling a giant wooden barrel with water.

     “What are they up to?”, I asked amused. “Every year in June, since  1968 alias the 500th