Traumatic events always change the perception of the world as well as the perception of ourselves within a particular space. They set a “before” and “after”, which cannot be avoided. In 2012, after 13 years, I was forced to go back to my homeland after an important road accident I had whilst working in the Balkans. This is when I began to see this place in a different way. I never felt a strong connection to that anonymous part of Italy, but I noticed that most of the things were bringing me back to my childhood. I have always had this ambivalent feelings of love and hate towards what I was supposed to call “home”. I had to shed my skin is an investigation of themes such as homeland, family, roots and belonging and what they actually meant to me. I started looking for traces, taking bits and pieces from my personal and faded memories. Suddenly, I felt the urge to regularly go back to make photographs of the place, to explore it like I never did in the past. Before that, the only reason to go back was to spend some time with family and friends and go away as quickly as possible. The series, which is about to become a book in May 2022, is the result of many road-trips from the place where I'm based now to Abruzzo, the Italian region where I was born. I was struck by the fact that so many things had drastically changed, whereas others had remained the same. My eyes were caught by these symbols that metaphorically recalled the idea of home, underlining how much I have changed throughout these years both as a person and as a photographer. Therefore, I have tried to adapt my new way of working through the landscape, without mentioning the actual place, and sequence the work in a way that would create “my own world” of what I had in front of me. It has not been easy to work in such environment, but, at the same time, it made me feel that important tension that made me want to return and work within that land. Something that had never happened before.