Italy Goes on Holiday
MAXXI, Rome, Italy
Massimo Vitali, Catania, Solarium (2007)
It’s 40 degrees, summer is at its peak and your thoughts turn to the holidays. MAXXI is celebrating Italy’s reputation as a tourist destination with the exhibition ‘L’Italia va in vacanza’ (Italy Goes on Holiday’), the first in a series of exhibitions showcasing the museum’s vast photography collection.
Alex MacLean, Marina di Pisa (2007)
The 80-plus works in the exhibition are by Alex MacLean, John Davies, Massimo Vitali, Walter Niedermayr, Giancarlo Ceraudo, Bruna Biamino, Nunzio Battaglia, Francesco Radino, Fabio Ponzio and Fulvio Ventura. Curator Francesca Fabiani chose the photographs from a project titled ‘Atlante Italiano’ (Italian Atlas), which was commissioned by the government to document the Italian landscape and its transformations in 2003 and 2007. Mysteriously, this useful piece of information was not mentioned in any of the exhibition’s supporting material.
Francesco Radino, Gardaland (2002)
Nevertheless, the selection of photographs survives this injustice, showing how almost every inch of the country’s landscape has been damaged by human presence. In other words, bell’Italia is not always a holiday oasis. Massimo Vitali’s work is a good example of this. In his 2007 photographs – Palermo, Mondello Beach and Catania, Solarium – both individuality and the details of the landscape are lost in the swarm of beachgoers. Emphasized by Vitali’s masterful use of the high-angle wide shot and rarefied light, people are depersonalized and nature is dematerialized.
Alex MacLean goes one step further by shooting from the air. In 2007, he flew over central Italy during the summer to photograph the beaches of Forte dei Marmi on the west coast and Rimini on the east coast. The images almost mirror one another, which Fabiani emphasizes by displaying them as a diptych. From a bird’s-eye view, myriad sunbathers and umbrellas are specks on the coast, forming colorful arabesques and geographic formations that make the crowds of tourists almost look pretty. Such tension between nature and mass human presence is a key component of Walter Niedermayr’s 2007 diptychs of the Alps. Drei Zinnen (The Three Peaks of Lavaredo), which features the most famous mountain range in the Dolomites, show how places once thought inaccessible have now been colonized. Clusters of people litter the pristine mountaintops, but they’re small, even microscopic in Stilfser Joch (The Stelvio Pass). Taking a page from 19th-century Italian writer Giacomo Leopardi’s worldview, human beings are insignificant creatures when compared to the magnitude of nature. Skiers in the white snow seem lost, like ants in a sugar bowl.
Bruna Biamino, Marina di Massa (2002)
Bruna Biamino concentrated on the off-season. Her photographs of the Tuscan coast in October concentrate on footprints in the sand and the occasional inflatable toy. The desolation of the landscape is underlined by the use of flat, diffused light that blurs the people in the background, making them resemble ghosts.
Fulvio Ventura, Venezia (2007)
In stark contrast to Biamino’s bleak subjects are Italy’s cities, which are never without tourists, no matter what the season. Unlike Niedermeyer’s and MacLean’s landscapes, however, Fulvio Ventura’s photographs of tourists in Venice fail to capture the problems of mass tourism in a city that is sinking under its weight. Twenty million tourists visit Venice every year, its residents are leaving and the city has become something of an amusement park.
Such is the focus of Francesco Radino’s eery photos of Gardaland, Italy’s most famous amusement park. In these black and white multiple exposures from 2002, what should be the portrait of a fun day has been turned into a nightmare: images of humans and scenery overlap to become otherworldly and spectral.
Landscapes have held a significant place in Italian photography since 1984’s landmark project ‘Viaggio in Italia’, a visual investigation of the Italian terrain, conceived by Luigi Ghirri and produced by 20 national and international photographers. ‘Italy Goes on Holiday’ is the latest important step in the same tradition, and it has whetted my appetite for the upcoming shows later in the series – once, that is, Italy has returned from its holiday.
Luisa Grigoletto
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