This project is dedicated to Michael Wolf and Hannes Wanderer.

'Alte Vie' (High Routes) is a collection of photos taken during my hikes in the woods where I grew up and in the surrounding mountains: Valle Intrasca and Valdossola in northern Piedmont. The need that led me to take these photos and to put them together is primarily visual, but in their relationship, I could discover other aspects that touch me closely. I am fascinated by those old paintings, produced by popular painters, “images before the society of images”, because they testify of life along the paths that I still walk today: I like to imagine that (at least in some cases) the inhabitants of those places have posed for those paintings.

I am also interested in representing the degradation of the images produced by man, both to save his memory, and to represent the impermanence of earthly things and thus the return to the stone of those images. Mountains and rock mounds have a physical and spiritual symbolism at the same time: combining them with the images produced by man serves me to express the need for transcendent, which I consider innate in human beings. If rock is a matter, the flesh of which we are made, the paintings represent human beings and our need for infinity, which becomes concrete in the need to produce and see images to give meaning to existence.

The project ws edited in collaboration with Baretto Beltrade.