Val d’Orcia, 2022

There are places we believe we know before we have even walked through them. Val d’Orcia is one of them: a landscape whose image has been shaped by photography through forms that have become so familiar that they are now almost inseparable from the place itself.

Returning to such places means confronting a distance between image and reality, between the landscape that has settled in memory and the one that takes shape in the present. Roads, curves, profiles and presences become elements through which to seek a more rarefied dimension, one in which the place can gradually free itself from its established image and become an experience in its own right.

The path thus becomes not merely a way of moving through the landscape, but a condition of looking. To move forward means giving up the view as a whole and entering a succession of presences, distances and pauses. Forms become detached from their function, time seems to slow down, and what initially appears familiar gives way to something more rarefied and uncertain.