Sometimes I feel a burning need to spend the day in Mombasa.
When I tell people about it, they ask me if everything is OK, if the stress hasn't thrown me off balance. Mombasa is hot, it is dirty, it is crowded, it is noisy.
Mombasa is Mombasa for many, and no doubt for me too.

Despite the urge to go there I often find myself lying in bed torn between the urge to run towards it and the sensibility of lying under the fan or the palm trees until evening.

Mombasa undoubtedly begins with war and is itself war: its oldest part is called Mvita - which in Kiswahili means ‘war’. But even the fiercest battles need truces to exist, and so Mombasissima is effort, it is war and it is also peace.

The highest obstacle is getting there without a car or a taxi, but once I have overcome my repulsion for the journey and my feet are resting on the earth of the island, all the anguish dissipates and my stomach opens, eager to eat up all that frenetic life marked by very slow, dragging steps, stretching the kikoy that cover men's legs and the dhera that wrap around women's legs.

For me, the city is synonymous with walking with different gaits in each district.

In the Old Town, the walk is slow and disenchanted, suitable for being carried away in unplanned directions. Slow enough to let my brain's navigator work and help me find my way home at the end of the day. Go there with someone who knows it, a discreet presence but who knows how to move and protect you if necessary.

The Old Town is an explosion of civilisation and more than a few times I look up to the second or third floor of those imposing and unkempt buildings and imagine what it would be like to live there, opening the window at dawn what noises would I hear? I love it when my walk is interrupted by the chants of the Muezzin calling for prayer from the loudspeakers of the Mosques.

Hayya ‘alas-Salah - come to prayer chants the Muezzin twice. To the prayer I will not go, but in that moment, that sound that fills the streets gives meaning to the dirty yellow walls, the inlaid doors, the cats sleeping with one eye open, the baraza at the foot of the houses and the creaking wooden terraces.

The old town is antique shops and brass lamps that close at every prayer, biryani rice, mutton and camel meat, carpet looms, Bwana Omari's pharmacy-herbalist-holy-texts shop, tamarind juice, Swahili coffee and kaimathi.

And it is halwa, that soft, elusive sweetness that is halwa.

Outside the old city, the walk down Biashara Street is forced to change pace. The steps are tight and fast, the glances are fleeting, and rapt gazes rest on every door to avoid too long glances that would correspond to insistent invitations to enter, despite the fact that today there is no need to buy padlocks or women's clothes with a style far too ostentatious to be called kitsch. This street is a catwalk of all the city's scents: the thousand cologne that women and men love so much mingles in a pulsing aroma with the sludge of frying oils, the diesel burnt by tuk-tuks, a few fish that have fallen to the ground from a cart and rotted, the overripe pineapples fermenting about to explode. In Biashara Street, everyone has his or her own shop, whether it is for kangas, kitenges or light bulbs, and for everyone all the other shops other than their trusted ones are shady places where hustlers operate at 50 shillings a metre or a piece.

And finally, at least for the space of this article, the pace changes again when walking along the Mama Ngina promenade. Here everything relaxes, the steps become long and the body willingly accepts to be enveloped by that sea breeze that brings coolness to the skin, along with a little salt that mixes with the sweat and dust that have already stuck to the neck, forehead and backs of the hands. The ice-cream carts offer a hundred flavours without revealing that all of them are ‘99% sugar’, so your thirst will become fierce.

The coconut vendors offer them to you hiding the fact that they have been in the sun since the crack of dawn and that after sipping that sweetish liquid you will feel sticky on your tongue, begging for a bottle of ice water. Better just to indulge in the breeze.

The breeze that brings a breeze of peace to the edge of a city that is so intense that it makes you long for the sea and so slow that you dream of driving a bulldozer to knock everything down and break away from that unstoppable, slow pace.

Go to Mombasa if you can, expecting nothing more than the enjoyment of every happening. Without wishing for anything more than the slow or fast but incessant walking that will deliver you to the night exhausted and with eyes full of so much life, this time without M. At that moment only peace and no war.

Michele Senici, 1993. Educator, teacher, project coordinator. I opened Casa Hera in Diani because I did not know where to continue my life. Have I realised this now? Certainly not, but that's OK, at least I observe, I think, I write.