Il Mezzogiorno – il mio amore sporco

There is some disturbing ambiguity in the fascination with which we are drawn to images depicting decay, ruin, and destruction. All the more so when they concern human life, set in and marked by such scenery. A similar consternation is caused by the fact that one of the constantly recurring themes of photography or painting is humanity crippled by the destructive passage of time, affected by some shameful frailty or repulsive ugliness. The photographer’s lens seeks their opposite pole as much as beauty and beauty.

I found this kind of photographic beauty in southern Italy.

For northern Italians, three-million-year-old Naples is the epitome of provincialism and disdainful exoticism. The plebeian temperament of the Neapolitans, their irritating dialect, poorly understood by Italians themselves, the pervasive chaos and disorder that are an integral part of life here, the incurable poverty and crime, are something completely foreign to residents of even the perfectly Europeanized Milan.

In yet another way, the quintessential periphery is Palermo, from which it is closer in a straight line to Tunis than to Rome. It is here, almost in the very center, that you will find La Kalsa – a slum neighborhood bombed during World War II and still not rebuilt, devoid of sanitation, which was marked on city plans as a white spot without streets or buildings.  

My photographs depict the people living there in their typical situations, in which both the dreariness and melancholy of their existence and its almost epic colorfulness are revealed.