It is a city of quite 10’000 inhabitants, but the great part of the buildings, most of them low, old and made by wood, or the new ones, built in traditional fashion, make it more similar to a big village. It is a touristic destination, but ambient conditions are very hard: average year temperature is 2°C and in July it is a little more than 11°C.

It is located among the see and the hill of the fjord, but its harbour isn’t an important commercial one. It is Hammerfest. It is located beyond the 70° of latitude, few kilometres away from Cape North and claims to be the most Northern city in the world.

Its economy has grown up in the last twenty years thanks to the discovery of methane wells not far from the Norwegian coast. Tourism, too, helped in the economical growth that seemed, once, in slow but relentless decline. Nevertheless, it is a difficult city to live in. Cold, covered of huge quantity of snow or rain. Quite no sun light for 6 months and, vice versa, no night for the other 6 months.

I arrived here at the beginning of May, after a whole day of travel; coming from Italy I got the sensation to enter a complete different world. The sensation was not only due to the snow that covered in part the land, the winter temperature and the frozen lake. Landed at about the 09.30pm and leaved the baggage in the hotel room, after an half an hour we were out searching for a restaurant. And then I realized that that dusk light will illuminate all the night.

Weather remained cloudy for all the time that I stayed there. And with that grey sky it was difficult to catch the difference between night and day. And these sensations brought to me memory of an hallucinated film starring Al Pacino: Insomnia. In the film, this fine border between day and night, the lack of the nightly dark was the humus over which grew up emotions and the plot.

But more involving was to stay, for quite all a day, outside among the fjord, twenty kilometres far from Hammerfest, on the see. In these places, human traces are feeble. We have habit to live in anthropized environment, rich of infrastructure; being lost in the silent of a grey see, grey sky and grey land with few human marks, make feel to be in a different dimension.

I think that, when the sun shines, it is possible to enjoy a beautiful landscape; but, in any case, even in the condition that I found, for a short time of stay, the place is strongly involving and more true than the tourist representation.