Perle Nascoste

In the time of placeless places, without history, memory, or identity—from airports to outlets, from highway rest stops to railway stations—we often find ourselves living as unaware wanderers in landscapes increasingly filled with emptiness.

In this time that makes us citizens of the world without truly making us citizens of anything, we need a pause.

A pause of the gaze. A pause of feeling and thinking.

Hidden Pearls was born from this pause.

Between 2017 and 2019, I photographed the historical nuclei of the Vedeggio Valley, searching for what remains beneath the accelerated transformation of the territory.

Not monuments. Not architecture intended as spectacle. Rather, fragments of an identity that still survives in the ordinary: stone walls, thresholds, windows, courtyards, proportions, traces of human presence.

The camera became a way of slowing down the gaze and giving attention to places that are easily overlooked.

The images were later collected in Perle Nascoste, a photographic publication that gives form to this research and to the idea that memory is not something distant or abstract. It is embedded in the places we pass every day.