Never truly a stranger

The project focuses on my homeland in southern Italy. I committed myself to seeing it through a foreigner's gaze and, in doing so, I discovered many things I didn't know, I met incredible people and, above all, I fell in love with the place where I live.

“We are never truly strangers to what happens around us — and even less when we are alone. The body is an organ for plunging into the outside world, like stone, like lichen, like a leaf.”

from “Verso la foce” by Giovanni Celati.

I live in the province of Caserta, in southern Italy, in the so-called Land of Work (Terra del Lavoro) due to its fertile soil, also sadly known as the Land of Fires due to the frequent fires of illegal landfills. Here the local mafia, Camorra, has too often shaped the landscape and imposed its rules like a state within a state. This is how my homeland is generally portrayed in the media, and being honest, it's the truth.

Ever since I began making pictures and exploring the language of documentary photography, I've felt a strong urge to share my perspective, convinced that there was still much to say about this places. So I decided to begin this project-journey with a special guide at my side: I'm following the course of the longest river in southern Italy, Volturno, which after a short stretch in the north (Molise region), it crosses the entire province of Caserta before flowing into the Tyrrhenian Sea in Castel Volturno. More than two years after the project began, today for me the river is like the long corridor of a large house, whose rooms I enter with respect, then stay, meet its inhabitants, and share with them the purpose of my work. In the large house, there are cozy and sunny rooms, others dark and squalid, but above all, countless people doing their best to live a dignified and fulfilling life. Some come from African or Asian countries, drawn by the dream of a better life. I'm struck by their ability to preserve traditions and cherish the memory of distant families, despite having to struggle to obtain the most basic things due to strict immigration laws. To my surprise, most of the people I met enthusiastically grant me permission to photograph them because they all love the place they live and want to convey this feeling, so I feel this project belongs to all of us.

The project is ongoing.