Temporary Life

Italy is strongly interested by a seismic activity. Due to bureaucratic and maladministration issues, there are several places where the temporary accommodations built after the tragedies, become permanent.

I’ve been traveling through my country, where the earthquakes have destroyed lives, hopes and lands, photographing everything was left of people and buildings after the years had passed.

The landscapes I’m seeing in my trips are diverse, from Ernestina’s world, who had lived almost 30 years in an Asbestos temporary house, to the peasants of Balsorano and the surrounding villages who, after generations passed waiting for a new house, renewed the temporary houses built after the Avezzano earthquake in 1915, or the people who leave in the barracks in Messina, built in 1908, where is now a custom to move to the slum if there isn’t enough money to afford a rent.
In Sicily, in the area called Belice, the towns that where hit by the earthquake, have been entirely rebuilt, but the old broken towns have been left as they where in 1968.
In the small town of Giove di Valtopina, in the central part of the country, no one died for the earthquake of 1997, only the buildings needed to be reinforced, but in 2012 four families are still leaving in the residential containers.
In L’Aquila, a unique and beautiful art city built in the XIII century, where the earthquake happened three years ago, the ancient town is abandoned and, in November 2012, the restoration works still have to begin.
In the second part of the project, while shooting the pictures, I looked for evidence and memories: a luggage for a trip that was never accomplished, some black and white pictures, letters consumed by time and used shoes. From the rubbles emerged the tormented disillusion of who has deep roots in a land where the eternal unfinished doesn’t shock anyone anymore; but also the persistence of a never ending fight, looking for a place to call home.