Stefano De Luigi on his long journey through Italy, in search of traces of what was once called the Bel Paese. We are faced with a ‘truthful’ description of Italian landscapes, and yet the classical narrative.

Stefano De Luigi’s images restore the landscape’s semantic value. The Italian landscape is a complex one, subject to the continuous superimposition of new signs. Yet in some ways, it is also a resistant landscape. While on the one hand, in fact, these signs – mostly similar and very much the offspring of consumer society and mass tourism – make Italy alternately a commodified trophy to be exhibited or “one anonymous, unfriendly, messy suburb,” on the other hand, they are sometimes grafted onto different realities – the upshot once again of those local identities that have long characterized the various areas of the peninsula – giving rise to genuine short circuits of meaning and vision where, in a bizarre potpourri, the contemporary and the ancient, the beautiful and the ugly, the rare and the banal, the serial and the unique all dialog with one another.