Gino, the old man, and I would sit for perhaps one or two hours watching the silent world of the exuberant life of Portofino as Gino had recorded it on film. The faces I saw were often recognizable to me. The fishwife silently screaming, “Pesce fresco!”—I had no idea Gino ever rose before noon and I knew she only came into the square early in the morning. Gino was a man of many parts and hidden depths—tourists getting off the cruise boats that hugged the shore between Rapallo and Portofino stopping at jetties along the way to pick up fat, sweating German families with their Leica cameras in brown leather cases; English clans with a nanny leading the way, fat-cheeked, sailor-suited three-year-olds in tow; stoic Swiss who were doing their duty in taking an annual holiday but were silently wishing they were back in a nice clean park in the suburbs of Zurich or Kloten; and a handful of gangling Americans. The Americans were all a good head taller than the Germans and positively towered over what appeared to be the European pygmies surrounding them. They smiled a lot and it seems were forgiven for being perpetually lost and needful of direction to “The Ristorante” or “The Toiletta” at every turn. Sometimes Gino would follow a pretty Italian girl; an undiscovered Gina Lollobrigida, she would invariably have a scarf and perhaps sunglasses. Laughing in black and white, hand on hip, she would turn and shake a flirtatious finger at Gino and his unsteady camera. Not really because she wanted him to stop filming but as an excuse to face the camera at a better angle.

The next shots were all taken at a funeral. A sea of black suits and pasty white faces. Then, inexplicably, there were shots of Jerusalem taken from the back of a Jordanian camel whose head would swing into the frame from time to time. I did not know Gino ever left Portofino! This was a revelation indeed.