Cities, like people, have their own voice. They speak through the streets that cross them, the architecture that defines them, the faces that inhabit them. But what happens when their story becomes a whisper, when their grandeur becomes a distant echo? The city tells its story is a photographic project that arises from the need to listen to this voice, to capture through the lens the dialogue between what has been and what remains.
Through the play of reflections on the shop windows, the images offer a double reading: on the one hand, the concreteness of streets, buildings, street lamps and people; on the other, their ephemeral projection, like a memory that mixes with the present. A delicate, and at the same time incisive, way to underline how Catanzaro was once perceived as a “big city”, and how today its image has become more nuanced in the eyes of those who live there and those who visit it.

Each shot becomes a mirror, not only physical but also symbolic. The city reflects on itself, duplicating itself in a dimension balanced between dream and reality. The shop windows, the glass plates, become windows through which to observe a suspended time. During the day, natural light sculpts the shapes, revealing hidden details; at night, the street lamps illuminate the streets with a melancholic nostalgia, giving off an almost cinematic atmosphere.
The alternation between black and white and color images helps to strengthen the sense of contrast between past and present. The monochrome recalls the memory, the archive of memory, while the color restores the vitality that still resists, despite everything. The streets, once the pride of the city, now seem to exist in a sort of double dimension: the tangible one and the one that remains only in the reflection, almost as if wanting to remember what has been without being able to fully grasp it anymore.

Poetic Reading

Catanzaro looks at itself in the mirror and wonders,
if it is still what it once was,
if the steps on its streets take you far away
or are lost in an echo that does not respond.
The street lamps light up memories,
are refracted in silent glass,
show two cities: one that lives,
and one that dissolves in the reflection.
You walk and you no longer know if you are looking at reality
or the dream of those who remembered it as great.
The city tells its story, but who listens to it?

The project “The city tells its story” is therefore an invitation to look beyond the surface, to read in the reflections not only a play of images, but a reflection on the perception of the city, on its identity and on the way in which it continues to live in the eyes of those who observe it.

Prof. Vittorio Politano
Art Theorist and Director Emeritus of the Academy of Fine Arts of Catanzaro