Is there a way to define a site authentic? Are there aesthetical, physical, geological parameters to measure the authenticity of a site? What is the boundary within which it is possible to recognize an object, a building, a tree, a word, as in accordance with the nature of a city, a region a community. Authenticity in the practice of the tourist is an obsession. It is an impossible horizon, it is an angst that arises moment by moment, in the continuing attempt to photograph, to portray, to capture the true. The truth of the places is the reason of this work, better still if it is the study of its ineffable manifestation.

When we think about the history of a place, we mean a fabric dense of connections in which people, their objects, their material, spiritual, linguistic manifestations, contaminate each other. It is the same contamination, that perforates the surface of authenticity, a thin but documentable passage from the extraneous to the familiar, the subject on which I decided to focus my interest. The tourist moves itself as a probe in the space, in the spasmodic research of the true experience, but watching where? Where does he see the history emerging? At what vocabulary refers?

What instruments does he use, and most importantly, what does he expect from places? Following the steps of this probe, I realized how these aesthetic definitions disappointed, one by one: beyond the problem of the ancient and the new, the beautiful and the ugly, the natural and the artificial. It ‘strange how these theoretical pillars, on which we built for centuries our language about places, shatters themselves in the places where they took form. The Mediterranean is the value, the essential function, the round table on which the terms of the observation were decided. In the Mediterranean things were understood, things were measured because it was retraced the original narration. The Mediterranean, the subject on which I worked on, it’s an impossible portrait, it’s far from an exact and proportionate aesthetic. Taking photos I understood that the problem, in the Mediterranean, do not concern a candid frontispiece that was mocked up, or simply a “crisis”, rather it is an endogenous process of mutation, of course, but a mutation that gets to the essence of the place, and its perception.