Is it possible to use photography to rebuild old memories? How can we translate elusive sensations into images? Those are the questions I tried to answer through my project “L’Oasi” (the Oasis). At first glance, “L’Oasi” looks like a photographic documentary of Ciociaria, an area in central Italy unknown to many. Halfway between Rome and Naples, hidden between mountains, Ciociaria is a land of contradictions: piety overlaps with superstition, and the green of the wild landscapes contrast with the grey of the many abandoned factories. As a child, I spent many summers in Ciociaria, playing with my siblings and cousins in my grandfather’s countryside house. Upon his death in 2000 the house was sold, and all that remains is an iron sign reading “L’Oasi”, which my grandfather had hung next to the front door, and which my father managed to salvage. For years, Ciociaria was for me only a distant, pale memory of carefree days and childhood games. Recently that memory has become more concrete, to the point of becoming cumbersome, almost an obsession. So, in September 2021, I returned to that secret, melancholy oasis, embedded between the Ernici Mountains and the Casilina highway. For over a month I tirelessly drove through countryside roads, guided only by memory and curiosity. Using a digital camera, two film cameras, a Polaroid and a drone, I tried to capture the blurring of past and present that pervades those valleys, especially on foggy days. I searched for old postcards in local markets, and scanned photos taken by my grandfather in the 1950s, unearthed from family albums. Consequently, underlying the documentary aspiration, there is a much more ambitious project: to compare memory with reality, attempting to sharpen images faded by time. And, above all, to assuage the nostalgia that torments those who, like me, have lived far from home for years and are forced to continually turn their gaze to the past.