Generally speaking Genoa is a low rise City.
It climbs from the harbour up into the hills behind and most of the houses climbing up the hillsides are painted in various pastel shades, pinks, creams, greens.
However down in the Marina things are different as the huge private yachts line the harbour side, the boats here are mainly white with the occasional blue, grey or black.
Further out in the Cruise Ship Terminal the great ships lie at anchor awaiting a new crew and new passengers before the next voyage.
These liners are huge, for all the world like enormous blocks of flats lying on their sides on the water, with lines of windows sightlessly reflecting the warm Ligurian sun.
Passengers walk around the harbour to a viewing point where they can take a photograph of themselves with their ship in the background.
Cruise ships are suddenly in the news for the worst of all reasons as disaster at sea has caused needless deaths and the press coverage has been full of stories both heroic and tragic, of crew and passengers, often behaving selflessly without thought for their safety or lives.
Across Europe in a tiny overgrown graveyard in a Cumbrian Village there is a Gravestone depicting the name of Joseph Bell, Joseph was the Chief Engineer on the Titanic, recently my Grandchildren mentioned that they were studying the disaster whose centenary is April 15th this year and I was able to tell them about the local connection with that disaster.
The gravestone carries a biblical sentence, greater love has no man than this that he lays down his life for his friends.
In Genoa last year I was invited to join the Coastguard cutter and the clergy from the Church of St Francis in a ceremony which is enacted each year to carry a wreath out to the Harbour Bar where it is laid on the water to commemorate the sinking of a British Merchant Ship, The London Valour which sank off Genoa in a freak storm in April 1970.
The sea is a dangerous and unpredictable environment.
However the last Labour Government decommissioned the Royal Yacht Brittania on the grounds of cost rather than safety.
The present Government appears to be pursuing a strategy to build or purchase a new Royal Yacht to use as a floating University and Research vessel, the expense will be considerable, covered by private donations and justified as an appropriate celebration of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee.
This at a time when the Government is cutting back on investment, choking off growth, savagely reducing the Welfare Bill,, replacing Disabled Living Allowance and insisting that, we are all in it together.
Well, maybe those who lost their lives on the Titanic were all in it together and the poor passengers in steerage lost their lives alongside others who died with small fortunes in loose change in their pockets.
The recent tragedy off the Italian Coast saw the same situation perhaps with rather more evidence of panic but many were saved.
In Genoa the superb Museum of the Sea offers the visitor a graphic and moving interactive display depicting the many thousands who were driven from their homes by poverty to seek a new life in a new country.
Now there is nowhere for the poorest to flee to start over with hope and aspiration, we are in fact all in it together.
We are charting new economic waters, we are appear to be all at sea, we are drifting, uncertain whether the Euro will survive, whether the Brics will lead us forward into new prosperity or whether we will become client states with rapidly reducing production and rapidly increasing poverty, holed beneath the waterline and without a lifeboat.
One thing it seems is certain the wealthiest will be on their yachts sailing for the offshore Tax Havens where they will pay less tax and not have to share the uncertain fate awaiting the rest of us who don't have a yacht to our name.
It climbs from the harbour up into the hills behind and most of the houses climbing up the hillsides are painted in various pastel shades, pinks, creams, greens.
However down in the Marina things are different as the huge private yachts line the harbour side, the boats here are mainly white with the occasional blue, grey or black.
Further out in the Cruise Ship Terminal the great ships lie at anchor awaiting a new crew and new passengers before the next voyage.
These liners are huge, for all the world like enormous blocks of flats lying on their sides on the water, with lines of windows sightlessly reflecting the warm Ligurian sun.
Passengers walk around the harbour to a viewing point where they can take a photograph of themselves with their ship in the background.
Cruise ships are suddenly in the news for the worst of all reasons as disaster at sea has caused needless deaths and the press coverage has been full of stories both heroic and tragic, of crew and passengers, often behaving selflessly without thought for their safety or lives.
Across Europe in a tiny overgrown graveyard in a Cumbrian Village there is a Gravestone depicting the name of Joseph Bell, Joseph was the Chief Engineer on the Titanic, recently my Grandchildren mentioned that they were studying the disaster whose centenary is April 15th this year and I was able to tell them about the local connection with that disaster.
The gravestone carries a biblical sentence, greater love has no man than this that he lays down his life for his friends.
In Genoa last year I was invited to join the Coastguard cutter and the clergy from the Church of St Francis in a ceremony which is enacted each year to carry a wreath out to the Harbour Bar where it is laid on the water to commemorate the sinking of a British Merchant Ship, The London Valour which sank off Genoa in a freak storm in April 1970.
The sea is a dangerous and unpredictable environment.
However the last Labour Government decommissioned the Royal Yacht Brittania on the grounds of cost rather than safety.
The present Government appears to be pursuing a strategy to build or purchase a new Royal Yacht to use as a floating University and Research vessel, the expense will be considerable, covered by private donations and justified as an appropriate celebration of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee.
This at a time when the Government is cutting back on investment, choking off growth, savagely reducing the Welfare Bill,, replacing Disabled Living Allowance and insisting that, we are all in it together.
Well, maybe those who lost their lives on the Titanic were all in it together and the poor passengers in steerage lost their lives alongside others who died with small fortunes in loose change in their pockets.
The recent tragedy off the Italian Coast saw the same situation perhaps with rather more evidence of panic but many were saved.
In Genoa the superb Museum of the Sea offers the visitor a graphic and moving interactive display depicting the many thousands who were driven from their homes by poverty to seek a new life in a new country.
Now there is nowhere for the poorest to flee to start over with hope and aspiration, we are in fact all in it together.
We are charting new economic waters, we are appear to be all at sea, we are drifting, uncertain whether the Euro will survive, whether the Brics will lead us forward into new prosperity or whether we will become client states with rapidly reducing production and rapidly increasing poverty, holed beneath the waterline and without a lifeboat.
One thing it seems is certain the wealthiest will be on their yachts sailing for the offshore Tax Havens where they will pay less tax and not have to share the uncertain fate awaiting the rest of us who don't have a yacht to our name.
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