While enjoying the incredible views from the terraces of Duomo in Milan, my instinct was to snap some cliché images of the Gothic statues superimposed on the modern skyline, without any human element or significant emotional content. This is a typical reaction of a photographer to a famous (i.e. often-photographed) tourist attraction.
I think that analyzing my subjective experience of a famous site produced a greater variety (and perhaps even quality) of shots than trying to reproduce iconic shots taken by someone else would have allowed.
I bought a two-day ticket, which allowed admission to various sites, including the terraces on the rooftop of the cathedral. From there, one can see small statues nested int the niches of the spires that face away from the streets below.
exclusively. It is wide enough to allow some flexibility for 
When I took photos of my mother and daughter baking together in a small kitchen, the quarters were so tight that I did not have much choice in terms of the composition. Fortunately, a 35 mm lens provides a wide enough field of view to allow some cropping afterwards. In terms of the colours, I did not want to convert the photos to black-and-white if at all possible, so I tried to position myself so that the brightly coloured background elements (e.g. a wall calendar, etc.) would not be in the frame. In this particular case, the scene itself, which has a lot of sentimental value for me, outweighs the technical shortcoming.
Some of the street corners in the neighbourhood where I grew up look as if they were taken out of Milan, with a notable exception of many advertising signs and billboards, all in loud, conflicting colours. Right next to these neighbourhoods are new construction cites and Soviet-style architecture that are characteristic of China.
This is not a big problem in the sense that could have been worse (e.g. I could have lost images from a professional assignment), but it is definitely frustrating. I guess, the dual CF slots and the option to write files on two cards simultaneously in my 
are there for this kind of eventuality.
The sign at the entrance showed a camera in a red circle, crossed with a red line. Suspecting that in this case “no” does not necessarily mean “no”, I asked a lady at the ticket office to confirm, and she said that photography without a flash is allowed. Then she saw my camera (I had a 
lens, which happened to be extended to its longest focal length) and said that I cannot use it, because it was “professional.” As I was thinking about what to say, I turned the zoom to 24 mm, which made the lens shorter by about 50%. Seeing this, the lady said, pointing at the camera, “This is Ok. You can use that.”
Whether these parallels are useful, is a different question, though. I have read an autobiographic story by 
about an episode from his student years, when he was asked to draw parallels between poetry and theoretical physics. He did that, but pointed out that the world is full of such similarities, and therefore dwelling on them is meaningless:
I think Genova’s uniqueness is in its architecture. Specifically, it is in the contrast of the old town, with it’s maze of narrow alleys (“corrugi”), and the modern structures around the waterfront. There is also a noticeable contrast between the dark, dirty, graffiti-covered old town and the bright, sunny, romantic suburb of Boccadasse, which looks very similar to the nearby five villages known as Cinque Terre that are famous for their unique charm.