Roma. Il Fascino dell'Eternità

The squares, the monuments, the markets, the people. 226 photographs vividly bring out the life and poetry of that extra-ordinarily composite universe that is Rome. Leafing through Giancarlo Gasponi's volumes of photographs of Rome, we find a city that we can barely recognize at times. Even those better known places, the same ones we hurry through every day, seem to have been transported into a dimension where the beat of time is gentler, quieter. The photographer catches particular aspects and favours some hours of the day and certain seasons, but it is the light, above all, that he knows how to capture, a soft and enveloping light that bathes every element in an enchanted atmosphere. In order to enjoy a Gasponi book, one must study the images not as single "shots" but rather as fragments of a single thought; then this magic comes to life and spreads from one image to another, in the same way as water flows from one roof tile to another. And if we allow ourselves to be captured, we shall rediscover the old fascination of a Rome hidden within ourselves that we may have forgotten. A "Grand Tour", in its own way, in the city of the soul.