Milan in black and white

After six years spent in Rome, I moved to Milan with the feeling I would not fall in love with another city. But I have to say I was wrong, because for sure Milan is the first city I looked with a photographic eye, the first city that slowed my step down to let me look around and really enjoy every single ray of sunshine.  I took many of these pictures with my old bridge camera, before buying the reflex I have now, and for the first time I had the courage to get closer to people in the streets. What a conquest for the timid person I am, and what a sense of freedom!

Vittorio Emanuele Gallery

Carnival day

Love murmurs

Sunset in Indro Montanelli Park

Playing hide and seek in Vittorio Emanuele Gallery

Embrace in Piazza dei Mercati

Kiss spring

Stamperia Alberto Tallone

This is the first project I have worked on during my Master in Photojournalism (which is going to end, unfortunately). I am fond of it both because it represents my start in the photography world, and because I am deeply in love with all those ancient things which connect my present with that past sometimes I feel to belong. I went to the Alberto Tallone printing house last November, after visiting an exhibition in Pavia about Tallone’s publishing house. I immediately thought I had to go there to look around and take photographs, and I didn’t take too many weeks to realize I could actually do that . Tallone’s family received me in a very kind way. The stamperia is placed in the first floor of their house, a lovely cottage laying on the hills around Turin. And it is just what you can imagine when thinking about Gutenberg or Aldo Manuzio studios because Enrico Tallone prints his books by hands, using movable type and old machines together with precious handmade papers. I could follow him and his three sons during their day’s work and I decided to focus on their hands moving around objects we usually see behind a museum cabinet. I won’t include portraits in this photographic selection to let you touch the cold lead, the black ink, and compose, type by type, the first page of the book that comes on your mind from old memories.

Movable type’s drawers

Composing a page

The first little poem composed for the page printing

Breaking up the page

A can of ink

Pages composed and types