The fourth mural

About the place

Molassana, in the Val Bisagno of Genoa, marks a transition between the dense city and the valley communities that once developed along the river. Shaped by twentieth-century expansion, the neighbourhood grew into a layered environment of housing, small businesses, and major road infrastructures. Today, Molassana is a lived and socially vibrant district - not a tourist backdrop, but a place of everyday movement. The Poetry Unbound mural resonated strongly with Municipality IV Media Val Bisagno, which expressed the intention to continue collaborating and opening further walls in the area for artistic interventions.

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About the mural

Painted on a retaining wall along a busy road, Sebastiano Toncini’s mural transforms a functional concrete surface into a narrative space. The composition unfolds in two parts: a stylised female face, partially covered by a hand in a gesture of watchful vulnerability, and a dense, overlapping cityscape rendered in an intentionally unstable perspective. The painted city is not a literal depiction of Genoa, but an emotional reflection of its layered and stratified character. Installed in a space of constant movement, the mural addresses a passing gaze - encountered by pedestrians and drivers as part of the city’s flow. Rather than decorating the wall, it reclaims it, suggesting that even infrastructural margins can become sites of shared meaning and imagination.

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The poem

For this chapter, Dutch poet Saskia Stehouwer wrote Pellegrini e altri pedoni, a three-part poem that approaches the city as both body and labyrinth. Birds, words, streets, prayers, and memory intertwine as walkers move without seeking an exit. The city carries anger and dreams, yet leaves space within its bones for those who cross it. Together, poem and mural present the city as a place of passage and belonging — where walls do not only divide, but speak.