Montefortino, or Montefurtì in the local dialect, is a small town of medieval origin with 1,079 inhabitants, located in the mountains of the Central Apennines. Montefortino is one of those places that everyone would like to leave, because, as they always say, "there is nothing here". But it is also one of those places where those who have left always want to return. Above all, it is the town where I grew up, where I have lived all my life and from which I had to leave too early, first for studies and then for work. It's not true that there is nothing here, but it is true that there is less and less here. Over the course of my life I have seen factories close, jobs disappear, activities cease and too often I have seen my fellow citizens leave in search of a job or simply a place that could offer better prospects. We continue to abandon places like Montefortino because they are no longer economically competitive, ahistorical and deprived of the comforts we have become accustomed to; we make them empty shop windows, open-air museums devoid of everything that makes them alive. We entrust the fate of these places to the tourism machine, which fills them with visitors but empties them of their inhabitants. The idea of ​​this photographic project is that of an investigation, obviously not exhaustive, on what my hometown is like in the first years of this decade. With these images, taken over the last three years, I tried to understand who the "Montefortinesi" are and what they do today, what remains of the town of the past and how the territory and its inhabitants have changed. I tried to go beyond the rhetoric of the beautiful "village" country that so much is wanted to be shown nowadays, because Montefortino is also a place made of ugliness, ruins, fraternal hostility and denial of one's past. By mixing my photographs with documents, data, thoughts and the voice of those who represent this country that I love so much, I tried to make a portrait of what Montefortino is for me: a place with a thousand memories, dreams, lost hopes and with a future increasingly uncertain. A place from which I left without ever being able to truly abandon it; a place I think about when I'm away and a place I want to escape from when I'm in it; a place that made me feel guilty every time I left, because every absence here leaves an unfillable void.