Grand Tour

The Grand Tour of Italy was one of the must-dos for nobles, writers, poets and painters of ancient times. They would depart from northern Europe to spend 3-4 months in Italy, moving between the great art cities and the unique landscapes of our country.

My project is to tell the story of the relationship between Italy and some of the most illustrious foreign travelers who loved and lived it. A relationship that I try to describe through their words and original glimpses of Italy's landscapes and cities. And so I too set off for Liguria, to photograph views of the Gulf of Poets between Portovenere and Lerici, passing through Genoa and its famous aquarium in search of the panoramas that had enchanted A. Dumas. Then by ferry I crossed the Mediterranean to land in Sardinia and retrace D.H. Lawrence's journey during a vacation with his wife (a very different Sardinia from today's). Sicily was the next destination—the salt flats, the temples, the tufa cities and the Aeolian Islands—I visited them keeping Goethe and Maupassant under my arm. To wander through the calle of Venice I imagined myself as Thomas Mann in search of inspiration and then by vaporetto toward the "florida of Italy" as Hemingway defined it, the lagoon of Grado and Lignano to finally reach the far east: Trieste, adoptive city of an assiduous visitor: J. Joyce.