'Jubilee People' is the title of the photographic project by Tommaso Ausili and Carlo Gianferro. Their studio is located in the heart of Rome, a stone's throw from the Vatican - on the privileged route for all pilgrims, curious, tourists, religious, as well as for improvised tour operators who, even for a single day, gravitate to San Pietro for the Jubilee Year. In the Roam studio, the "dome" that stands out against a sky painted in electric blue, is the backdrop for a very special photographic set: San Pietro and its famous colonnade, on a day of full sun and with few people, not far from the real one, assaulted by hordes of tourists and lashed, of course, by the possible vagaries of time and history.

Just before entering the real square, the people of the Jubilee, or at least one of its representatives, stopped and underwent the portrait ritual. Just as the Pompeo Batoni painters of the Rome of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries worked to immortalize the tourists of the Grand Tour, so Ausili and Gianferro today compose, image after image, a visual story of the Grand Tour and its protagonists. Against the painted backdrop stood young seminarians, cheerful nuns, souvenir sellers, Roman gladiators, military men in great pomp, folklore witnesses of ancient European identities, convinced Catholics, simple onlookers, ministers of the church, families on a trip, and all human fauna which is the backbone of that religious tourism that the city attracts like few others in the world.

The silent and empty space of the studio isolates the subject who, now, is no longer one of the many tourists but finally becomes the protagonist of the image and, by extension, of his own journey. Each portrait is carefully studied: the subject takes possession of the scene and maintains its own autonomous relationship with the colonnade and the dome in a sort of symbiosis which will perhaps be difficult to find again. And if the background doesn't change, the images tell different stories. As if we were among the dioramas of a Museum of Natural History, each "painting" reveals a world and the different elements - the feathered hat, mirrored sunglasses, the monsignor's cloak ... - are the indications of a condition of existence sometimes far away, others very close, which we sense and which will then flow into the large melting pot of the colonnade, a few meters away.

Paradoxically, it is here, in the silence of the study, that the experience of travel not only knows a pause but can even be said to be authentic. The looks of the portraits reveal a mixture of depth, tension, aspiration, enthusiasm. In their eyes, in the posture that they offer to the photographic lens, we find that horizon of expectations of the traveler who, inexorably, will go to dilute, perhaps even to water, when, a few meters from there, the dream experience will become reality, and the pilgrim will leave his Grand Tour painting to enter the distracting confusion of the square.

- Alessandra Mauro