“Venice is a city with which I have always felt a kind of visceral and deep connection. To be honest, I don't really even remember the first time I went there, but I can imagine how this relationship between us was born by picturing the naive amazement of a little kid brought in a floating city with breathtaking architecture. “Kinda sick, right?” – thought the little Alessandro while taking a picture of a gondolier with his parents’ NokiaN90. But it wasn't just amazement.
Over the years I found myself coming back to visit the city, and time after time I realised that what kept attracting me was not just mere tourism, or seeing new things and having new experiences. I kept returning because of my connection to the city and my deep admiration of its spirit. The spirit of Venice, a sort of oxymoron embedded in the glass. A beautiful but decadent frame containing a baroque artwork filled with amazing contradictions. It’s the spirit of a city that is brimming with scenes that would not look out of place in a Sorrentino movie, in which classical perfection stands side by side with the degradation and the ugliness of the unregulated and unsustainable tourism that the lagoon has to deal with. It’s these two energies that create the city’s unique synthesis, that makes everyone who visits it fall in love with it.
I always appreciated Venice both for its classical, harmonious aesthetic and for its “trashy” aesthetic of unsightliness, and for the surprising result the coexistence of the two generates. Wandering through the city for the first time with a camera in my hands, during this last trip I took there, led me to try to use my 36 shots to depict not only the bright style of a romantic city, but also the scenes of its daily war between its own identity and tourism, water and marble, art and decay, in order to find and bring to light, in this war, its Dionysian and fascinating spirit.
Venice is a mood to feel and an atmosphere to live in. From its intense and typical smell of the sea, the Venetian accent of the gondoliers to the the three-euro Spritz in the university district of Campo Santa Margherita, Venice is a state of being. And as someone who travels with the aim of finding new things to be inspired by, I can say that every time I get off my train at the Santa Lucia Station, even before leaving the platform, I already know that I’ll find the same old city, but a brand new feeling in it.”
