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Dark Cloud Over San Pietro
The tension wasn’t subtle. I framed this on a humid Roman afternoon, the kind where the air sticks and light flattens the facades. At the vanishing point: San Pietro, serene and untouchable, a facade that’s absorbed centuries of ceremony and conflict. But in the foreground—armoured steel, automatic rifles, and red-striped barricades—modern anxieties assert themselves. This is what occupation looks like when dressed as precaution. The symmetry of the shot exaggerates the contrast. The axis from the dome to the vehicle is mathematically clean, unnerving in its balance. You can’t not look down the middle, and once your eyes reach the Iveco Lince, you realise you’re not a tourist anymore. You’re…
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Fixing the ship
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Technological Memento
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Taking-Off
This is a test for the Viltrox AF 56/1,4 XF’s autofocus. The pidgeon took-off suddenly and I just had to point and shoot. The lens behave fairly. I didn’t plan this shot—I reacted. The pigeon launched off the cobbles just ahead of me, wings outstretched, backlit by the fragmented morning light reflecting off the street. I tracked it instinctively and pressed the shutter a fraction before it left the frame. For a moment, everything aligned: subject, motion, light, and a surprising stillness in the middle of movement. The composition isn’t textbook. The bird isn’t centred—more like hovering toward the bottom third, wings drawing a wide V across the soft texture…
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A Fountain’s Jet
I took this shot with a Viltrox AF 56/1,4 XF at full aperture. The focus reacted swiftly, and the colours’ rendition is pretty accurate. There is minimal colour fringing. However, it is more likely caused by air bubbles rather than by the lens itself. Like its bigger sibling, the AF 85/1,8 XF, this lens is excellent. Photographing water at f/1.4 is, in many ways, an exercise in precision gambling. The Viltrox AF 56mm f/1.4 XF, mounted on the Fuji X-T3, gave me a razor-thin depth of field to work with. At this aperture, there’s no room for hesitation – you either nail the plane of focus or lose the subject…
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A Street-Skater
I came across him by the harbour on a day when the wind carried the smell of salt and diesel from the moored fishing boats. He wasn’t performing for an audience—just skating alone, immersed in his own rhythm. His movements were sharp but fluid, somewhere between dance and martial art. I wanted to capture that moment when the body leans into balance, teetering on the edge of a fall but never crossing it. The setting presented an immediate visual contrast: the fluidity of his posture against the static, almost heavy backdrop of the docked ships. I framed him to the left, letting the background breathe, so that the masts, ropes,…
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Open Interior
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Splinter
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Drying Clothes
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The Last Journey Of An Hero of Italian Motoring
Behold, the Fiat 500. Not the modern one that’s all airbags and Bluetooth and makes you feel like a fashion blogger. No, this is the real thing. The original. The glorious, underpowered, unapologetically tinny Italian shoebox. And look at it now—strapped to the back of a truck like a pensioner wheeled out of the bingo hall for the last time. Rusted. Flat-tyred. Beaten. Magnificent. I spotted it being hauled away through a southern Italian town, and frankly, I nearly wept. This was once the car that got a nation moving. The people’s Ferrari. The automotive embodiment of an espresso shot. And now? A hunk of oxidised metal destined for the…
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Lava Nails
The first thing that struck me when I looked at this photograph was the title — Lava Nails. It’s an evocative phrase, one that instantly conjures visions of volcanic rock cooling into jagged forms. In reality, of course, what we’re looking at is far more prosaic: rows of rusty rivets or bolts on a weathered surface. Yet, the camera has transformed the mundane into the dramatic. The composition is built on strong linear perspective. The rivets march away from the viewer, converging toward a vanishing point that lies just outside the frame’s blurred horizon. This forced depth, amplified by a shallow depth of field, isolates the tactile detail of the…
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A Skater
Framing the whole statue would have made this photo better. The mistake was caused by the necessity to shoot fast, the lens’ field of view and the distance between the subject and the focal plane.
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A Droplet
Sometimes the most unassuming subjects hold the greatest visual intrigue. A Droplet invites us to pause before a corroded pipe, its mouth fringed with moss and decay, and notice the minute beads of water suspended in time. The scene is humble, even neglected, yet it carries a quiet dignity — a testament to the slow, unrelenting processes of nature reclaiming the man-made. From a compositional standpoint, the photographer has made the astute decision to centre the pipe, drawing the eye directly to the mossy rim and the droplets. The shallow depth of field isolates the subject from the textured wall behind it, giving the image a pleasing three-dimensionality. The fine…
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An Essay on Composition
This photograph began with geometry, but it ended up being about contradiction. Sand, marble, sea—each a distinct texture, each performing under different rules. It’s not a landscape and it’s not abstract, but it borrows from both. The diagonal lines, the flattened depth, the conflict between order and erosion—all deliberate, but not staged. I rotated the frame on purpose. The eye expects a horizon, some gravitational anchor, but here that’s denied. The marble slabs—cold, precise, quarried and arranged—seem to float or fall, depending on how you orient yourself. The band of sand running diagonally across the frame interrupts their perfection with a tactile, natural disorder: dunes formed by wind, not by…
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Busker and Covid-19
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Inside the Nazario Sauro
An important piece of history of the Italian Navy, at the anchor in the Port of Genova.
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The Answer is On the Wall
When I first saw this wall, I knew immediately that it had to be photographed. Not because it was particularly ornate or historically significant, but because of the simple red digits painted on its surface: 42. For anyone who’s read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, this number isn’t just a number—it’s the number, the answer to life, the universe, and everything. And yet, here it was, not in some cosmic landscape, but on a weathered patch of brick and peeling paint. From a compositional standpoint, I kept the frame tight, letting the number sit just off-centre enough to avoid perfect symmetry. The texture of the wall does as much…
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A Virtual Glance Dance
The essence of this photo is all in the glances of the protagonists. The man looks at the woman, the woman looks at the luxury car. The essence of this photo is all in the glances of the protagonists. The man looks at the woman, and the woman looks at the luxury car. It is this subtle game of glances that tells a story and turns the photography from a casual picture into something worth seeing. Once again, it is not relevant whether the people portrayed are actually involved in the “glance dance”, as what matters is the image to convey the meaning created by the overall result. This confirms…
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Light as Meaning Shifter
The original idea behind this picture was to match the emptiness of the shop with the facelessness of the mannequin posing as a store clerk, to convey a general feeling of depersonalization. Unfortunately, the big lightblot represented by the poster close to the mannequin catches the observer’s attention and reduce the effectiveness of the composition. Instead of connecting the mannequin with the internal part of the store thus making sense of the whole picture, the eye just “sees” an ad poster.
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Beer or Spritz?
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Comarketing
Two adjacent shop windows that seem, unintentionally, to speak to each other. On the left, rare books and old prints rest under soft light, their pages worn and yellowed. On the right, a brightly lit glass case displays modern eyewear, polished and reflective, marketed with sleek precision. A drainpipe slices the frame in two, acting as a border between past and present, knowledge and fashion, permanence and trend. Technically, the image holds together through contrast. The exposure balances the dim warmth of the books with the cooler, artificial light of the glasses’ display. Reflections in the glass add layers, hinting at street life beyond the frame. The sharpness allows textures…
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What’s the Time?
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Garbage As Usual – Pantheon’s Nearby
Rome has an unrivalled way of holding beauty and decay in the same frame, and this street is no exception. The cobblestones, slick from a recent rain, mirror the ochre façades and Renaissance windows in a way that almost disguises the litter piled quietly along the curb. Almost. A man in a crisp shirt walks down the centre, back straight, seemingly immune to the refuse that flanks his path. It’s not that he doesn’t see it—it’s that he’s learned to live with it, as many Romans have. On the right, another figure leans against a doorway, absorbed in his phone, framed by stacked crates and plastic bags. Life continues unbothered.…
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Another Bridge
I shot this with a fisheye precisely to bend reality into something less familiar. The structure itself—a pedestrian bridge of steel and cable—already has a certain grace, but the distortion turns it into a sweeping arc that almost feels like it’s about to close in on itself. The cables draw the eye to the centre, while the graffiti below pulls it back to street level, grounding the image in the here and now. The day was heavy with cloud, the light diffused and slightly cold. That worked to my advantage: no harsh shadows to compete with the strong geometric lines, and just enough tonal variation in the sky to give…
