Category: Photography

[cartography of the ephemeral]

Photography, polytptych

Cartography of the Ephemeral
“The city is not a place, but a flow”

The city is not presented through its buildings or monuments, but through the successive presences that inhabit and vanish from it; it is constructed by memory (drawing on Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities).


The city’s identity is formed by an accumulation of lives, gestures, and anonymous trajectories. Photography becomes a reflection on time and the urban experience.


In a city, traces outlast individuals, turning the urban landscape into a silent archive of memories and passages. What matters is not merely what is visible, but the invisible stories that remain deposited upon these places (drawing on Calvino’s fantastic city of Tamara).

(from my project ‘Parallel Worlds: A Poetics Through Photographic Polyptychs’)

[the persistence of presences]

diptych, Photography

As in Eusapia (one of the most fascinating cities in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities), the figures inhabit an uncertain boundary between presence and absence. Bodies dissolve into light and shadow, becoming traces of a passage that is already beginning to transform into memory.


The city emerges as a place where the living and the absent share the same invisible space, reminding us that every human landscape is composed as much of those who traverse it as of those who remain within it, silently inscribed in time.

[poetry of architectural disillusionment]

color photography, diptych, Photography

[poetry of architectural disillusionment]

The city of Pirra (one of Calvino’s many incredible invisible cities), while merely imagined (and not yet visited by the traveler), inhabits a limbo; it is an incorporeal reflection.

In the dynamics of the city of Pirra, the glass grid represents the name “Pirra” or the mental blueprint: a clean, geometric, and predictable structure (the “towers and wide windows” Marco Polo imagined). The distorted reflections, meanwhile, represent the chaotic physical reality that dissolves the rigidity of our imagination. The real world “warps” the straight lines we create in our minds.

My Pirra exists only in a spectral state: it is there, yet intangible.
It exists solely as an image reflected on the glass surface, just as expectations exist only on the surface of our minds.

[Trajectory and belonging]

diptych, Photography

[Trajectory and belonging]
The stones seem to hold the echo of ancient footsteps. Mother and son, in turn, give substance to what time has not erased. Between them, the diptych bridges memory and presence, suggesting that a place is preserved not only in its physical forms but also in the people who continue to inhabit and reinvent it.

The diptych resonates particularly with certain cities in Italo Calvino’s *Invisible Cities*—places where identity is defined not by architecture but by memory, human relationships, and the persistence of time—especially Zaira, the city that “does not tell its past, but contains it.”

In Zaira, memory is inscribed in the streets, corners, walls, and objects, as well as in the stories and experiences of its inhabitants. The idea that “the path remains in the stones” speaks directly to this notion of a city that accumulates traces of the lives that have passed through it.

Cities are made less of stone than of the relationships, memories, and desires layered upon them (I. Calvino)