The Lost Hotel

I photographed this derelict façade in an Italian town on a walk that started with no intention and ended with this frame. “Albergo Aterno,” barely legible beneath a coat of turquoise decay, is what’s left of a forgotten hotel. I didn’t need to know its history to feel the abandonment radiating from every peeled layer of plaster.

The frame is pulled tight—the architecture becomes a subject in itself, the wires and conduit lines accidentally composing a crude symmetry that holds the chaos together.

This isn’t a pretty picture, and that’s the point. The scene punishes clean aesthetics. Harsh light from the afternoon sun exacerbates the texture—flaking walls, rusted metal, and faded lettering—all rendered with ruthless detail. I intentionally avoided correcting the colour cast too much, letting the unnatural blues and yellows linger as they do on location.

In compositional terms, the image relies on tension rather than balance. The pseudo-arch above the doorway frames the ghostly hotel name, while the exposed pipes break across it without care—modern infrastructure disrespecting old geometry.

It’s a photograph about traces—of use, neglect, and passing time. The hotel might have vanished from memory, but it clings to the wall in barely-there letters, waiting for the next layer of paint or the next collapse.