In a strip of land called Valdichiana,
between the cities of Siena and Arezzo (centre of Italy), and
through a depth network of dirty roads - sometime simple paths through
the fields - you can get access to a scenery where lots of old farms
and peasant houses remain the only testimony of a rural lifestyle quickly
disappearing today.
Most of these farms are just wrecks survived
for the moment to modernization that transformed some of them in “five
stars farm-holidays” or
houses with swimming pool and lots of other entertainments to rent for
holidays. These decaying and crumbling old farms are what left
of the peasant culture, faint signs still living
and witness of love for this land of our grandfathers and grandmothers.
Often these farms are completely reabsorbed by vegetation,
almost as if nature wish it would protect their historical meaning against
modernization. Other times they stand out so well across the fields that they
looks like living figures, speaking by themselves, telling their
own story, figures so similar to us because depository of a memory and
witness of passing time as well.
Having the opportunity to visit some them was a great
experience. Feeling and setting inside them was strange, almost surrealistic.
You could feel a great poetry all around. You face a waned reality with
signs left all around: in the air, in the walls, in the furnishings.
Walking through those empty rooms emerge in all their simplicity lifestyles
of people who lived them.
Traces is a collection of five different
portfolios each one dealing with a specific theme: the dangerousness,
the darkness and the brightness of these places as well as the traces
and things lefts by the people who lived there.
What's new - For each gallery now available a flash slideshow with much more photos. To look at photographs in this way please click on "Slideshow" behind each gallery title. To look at the pictures without the copyright watermark please use the slideshow mode.
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