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On Insincerity
This is a rant. It was caused by the umpteenth self-promotional, vertically shot from above video made toting a smartphone, in which, after the hideous opening — ‘hey guys’ — the main, and only, character promotes a personal achievement while pretending merely to ‘share a — God forbid — thought’. I usually try to be factual in my writing, stating my case in a clear and concise manner, always focusing on the merits of an issue and never blaming a person or a category. But.
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When Faith Is Gone
Few social habits rely more heavily on the embodiment of symbols to convey a message than religion —or religious beliefs. It doesn’t matter what faith one believes in, or if one believes in a faith at all. The power of the embodied gods —whether in their appearance or in abstract forms— elicits a reaction that doesn’t come from the prefrontal cortex. Indeed, projecting personal feelings or worldviews onto an object is not peculiar to religion. However, there is a substantial difference between worshipping a branded car or the uniform of a football club and a symbol that reminds us of the inevitability of our final journey. In fact, Italy is…
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Let the Party Started
2 June is Italian Republic Day. The official ritual follows its usual order: the laying of a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, followed by the military parade along Via dei Fori Imperiali, near the Colosseum. This year, however, the celebrations will also include a familiar exercise in civic spectacle: the predictable procession of distinguished figures from sport, the arts, and culture, assembled to give ceremony the appearance of public emotion. The chosen location is the esplanade of the Quirinale, the seat of the Presidency of the Republic, where a large temporary stage is being built, partly obscuring the Presidential building. In the background are the multicolor patches…
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The Next Emperor of Foro Italico
Late afternoon in Rome in mid-May. The Foro Italico hosts the Italian Open, where the gotha of the international tennis entertains the audience, while Piazza del Popolo a court where people are given, for free, access to pre-qualification matches, champions’ training sessions and exhibitions. The stars have not yet come out and the champions have not left their hotels, so in the meantime, young athletes are training in the hope that one day they will become the next emperors of Rome themselves.
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I Don’t Get It
This is the ad for an upcoming live concert of Zucchero ‘Sugar’ Fornaciari, a well-known Italian pop musician famous for his loosely blues-inspired music. Having been on stage for decades, Fornaciari is no amateur. I would therefore expect him to pay as much attention to his personal image as he does to his music. This is why I can’t understand why he would allow such a poor-quality poster to be used to promote his tour. The Fender Telecaster guitar, or rather a guitar resembling a Fender Telecaster, is poorly rendered — perhaps even by an AI. The headstock is completely wrong — it looks like it actually belongs to a Strat —…
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A Juggler in Bruxelles
Bruxelles, late afternoon of a spring day. The Gare du Midi is just a few hundred metres away. The traffic flows dully, green is a go, red is a stop. Cars halt at pedestrian crossings when someone approaches. Nobody tries to go through the junction stealing the few fractions of a second between the lights. The only moment of life —or chaos to some— in this ordinary end of an ordinary day equal to countless others in the past and future, is a street performer: a juggler trying to earn a few euros by showing off his prowness at bouncing a soccer ball. Sometimes he indulges too long on his…
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Even Venice Is Powerless Against A Smartphone
Taking meaningful photos in Venice is quite challenging because the strong déjà vu effect can blind you to the city’s beauty. I’m not talking about the myriad selfie-taking tourists who want to take home — or publish on their social media profiles — a small part of the city’s soul. They are not expected to understand even the fundamentals of photography, and they don’t actually need this knowledge to achieve their goal. I have no problem with that. People with ‘heavy calibre’, though, are a different matter. If they’re not going to walk around with massive bodies and lenses just for show, they should at least know a thing or…
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Why Writing About Photography Matters (or: The Importance of Re-inventing the Wheel)
This is the second of my series of short essays on photography. The title might sounds like a pre-emptive justification for clogging the Internet with yet another personal babbling about what photography is supposed to be, how photos should be taken, and so on. Actually, indeed, if one changes the names accordingly in T.S. Eliot’s quote (Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third) it become clear that there is little left to say about photography (with the exception of technical reports on cameras and lenses’ arcane features or performance essentially part of the industry marketing spins.) So, where is the point in keeping on writing…
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After the Rain
In the early days of April a few days of heavy rain were all that lasted to make the river Pescara, in the Abruzzo region of Italy, rise up to the limit of its banks. The raise was not significant, just enough to make the water quietly flow on the adjacent land. Still it caused problem and inconvenience for the boats that were small enough to be lift or submerged by the water. I am no expert in fluid or civil engineering nor do I hold extreme views on environmental preservation. Still, I can’t stop thinking about the possible correlation between a poor set of choices such as reducing the…
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Photography Does Not Exist (Until the Eye Makes It)
Foreword This post is the first of a series meant to organise in a logical and structured corpus the ideas collected in this blog throughout years of taking photos in various environments. Introduction A preliminary misunderstanding that should be addressed immediately is that a photography does not exist per se. The photograph begins only when the eye intervenes—when it selects, isolates, and organises a continuous visual field indifferent, in itself, to interpretation. This means that an image is not discovered but constructed, and this construction may even fail, as when a narrative is imposed that later proves to be incorrect. From the outset, therefore, photography must be understood as an…
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MARTian Stairs
The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto —MART, in short— is a place that definitely worth a visit, should you be traveling across the Trentino-Alto Adige region of Italy. Its main facility, an architectural masterpiece in itself, is located in Rovereto, a small town about half an hour (by car) from Trento. Unlike many small, old Italian towns, which often only have one main attraction, such as a monument, castle or nobleman’s palace, Rovereto is different. The town itself is an attraction, as it was the place that Fortunato Depero — one of the giants of ‘Second Futurism’ — made its centre of gravity, by opening…
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A Knitting Shop in Rovereto
During a casual walk in Rovereto, a lovely town in the Trento province, I stumbled upon a knitting shop. The display was full of bags and other items for sale, only, it was not a just a shop, but an actual factory where a the craftman was working on his weaving loom. In an age where mass production is the norm, luxury is often equated with displaying a logo rather than enjoying a product’s quality, it is almost hypnotic to witness the transformation of raw materials into useful and attractive items through human ingenuity. So, after spending a few minutes observing how the individual threads were being woven into a…
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The Sorcereress
This is a photo taken from the reportage of an actors’ collective’s ‘opera prima’. This time, the venue was a smaller theatre than those I usually work in. This meant there was less room for movement and only a few limited angles from which to take the shots. As a result, I mainly framed shots from below stage level, with very little freedom to move laterally. This forced me to rely almost entirely on timing rather than geometry. I therefore tried to draw the viewer into an uneasy proximity with the figure. This enabled me to focus on capturing expressions to reveal the character’s psychology.
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Breaking Through
This is one of the photos I took while courtside at a women’s handball match between the Italian and Bosnian national teams. I was there as part of the sports photography seminar I run at the university where I also teach sports law. This is why I had to produce teaching materials using a number of pieces of equipment and techniques, ranging from prefocusing with full manual lenses to fast target acquisition and single shot.
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Professional Courtesy
Chasing news lies at the core of any journalist’s work. The professionals who walk the streets instead of enjoying the comfortable seats on talk shows, discussing ‘life, the universe and everything’ (cit. Douglas Adams), are like sharks with a sense of blood. They can smell news from a distance or are part of an ‘intelligence’ network that tells them what and where. Indeed, photojournalists experience a particular challenge: reclaiming a vantage point from which to take the shot. This necessity often ends up in being ‘assertive’ when entering a scene or ‘elbowing’ those nearby to make room. Sometimes, though, there is also a show of professional courtesy, like in this photo…
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Misfocused Photo’s Quick Fix with ChatGPT and Nano Banana
When on an assigment I often take with me a second camera with a vintage lens. This is a way to test old glasses along modern ones, without risking failure. Every now and then, therefore, I switch from the work gear to the personal one to give it a try. Sometimes I get good results, some other times I don’t, like in this shot taken during the 2026 Italian Skating Championship. As it is apparent, I misfocused the skater trying to get up, so the photo turned out as an egregious miss. As they say, however, I exploited the mistake to turn a problem into an opportunity. So I decided to…
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We Make Cars, Not Videogames – An independent proof-of-concept in AI-made advertising
This video is a proof-of-concept for a short advertising campaign entirely designed and realised with an AI service. A bona fide brand, Alfa Romeo, was chosen to ascertaining the performance of the AI in a real-life scenario.
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A Composition’s Dilemma in Black and White
This photo, taken in the centre of Padua, shows a composition’s dilemma. The idea was to explore the usual technique of ‘framing’ a subject within an architectural structure to make it resemble a painting. Actually, though, the main subject, the biker and his vehicle, is more of a disturbance than something worth including in the picture. He runs from right to left, an unnatural direction. Indeed, since we are accustomed to look from left to right and not vice versa, the bikes seems to go outside the frame rather than into it. Furthermore, I should have waited for the subject to be right in the centre of the image. Had…
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Carl Zeiss Ultron 50/1,8 and Pentax K1 – An Empirical Field Test
Across this set, the Ultron performs as expected: good microcontrast and local separation, reasonably crisp edge definition where focus is placed, and a generally “clean” drawing that still keeps tonal roundness in mid-tones.
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Zeiss ZM Biogon 35/2 and Nikon Z5. An Empirical Field Test
This is an empirical field test of the Zeiss ZM T* 35/2 Biogon lens mounted on a Nikon Z5. As with all my technical tests, this one doesn’t deal with MTF, coma, fall-offs, etc., as I’d rather focus — pun intended — on the results.
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Knowledge in the Atelier (or: The First Shot of 2026)
This is my first attempt at taking a photo in 2026. I took it late one afternoon in my hometown, where I’m staying for a few days. My aim was to continue experimenting with the Nikon Z5 and various manual lenses. This time, I used the Nikkor 35 AF-D F2 — an old lens that is still very capable. Technically, the AF-D has autofocus. However, since I am using a ‘dumb’ adapter, I can only use the lens manually.
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Labour Spilling Into Transit Time
The underground systems in Tokyo, where this photo was taken during rush hours, offer countless opportunities to take interesting photos. It’s no surprise that coaches and platforms are an irresistible temptation especially for foreign photographers. Like every other first-time visitor, years ago I indulged in taking a few pictures in this environment, which, as often happens with photos taken by non-locals, were pretty similar in concept and composition to countless others. This is why I slowed down and tried to make sense of a photo before taking it (not only in Japanese underground). Sometimes, indeed, impromptu shooting works, but you have to be in a state of grace to actually…
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Portraits From Nagoro, the Scarecrows’ Village
In the heart of Iya Valley, in Tokushima Prefeture, lies Nagoro, the Scarecrow Village. Half a ghost-town, half a still inhabited place, Nagoro’s main population is composed by about 300 scarecrows spread all around the village.
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Bad Luck at Heian Jingu Shrine
As it is customary in Japanese Shinto shrines, also the Heian Jingu in Kyoto has an area where bad luck is left hanging in the open. 御御籤 —o-mikuji—are small strips of paper that people can choose at random to find out their fortune. As every tourist is told, the general rule is that you should keep the good omens and leave the bad ones hanging on a pine tree or a scaffold. The o-mikuji can be taken for free, however it is also customary to leave a 100-yen coin in return. In fact, this is one way in which shrines are able to sustain themselves, given that there is no…
