“We are never truly strangers to what happens around us — and even less when we are alone. The body is an organ for plunging into the outside world, like stone, like lichen, like a leaf.” (from “Verso la foce” by Giovanni Celati). I live in the province of Caserta, in southern Italy, the so-called Land of Work (Terra del Lavoro) due to its fertile soil, also sadly known as the Land of Fires due to the frequent fires of illegal landfills. Here the local mafia, Camorra, has too often shaped the landscape and imposed its rules like a state within a state. This is how my homeland is generally portrayed in the media and, being honest, it's the truth. Ever since I began making pictures and exploring the language of documentary photography, I've felt a strong urge to share my own perspective, convinced that there is still much to say about these places. So I decided to begin this project-journey with a special guide at my side: I'm following the course of the longest river in southern Italy. I decided to behave as a stranger to this land, I tried hard to see these places like it was the very first time, because I wanted to be able to truly see them with fresh eyes. Volturno rises in the north (Molise region) and crosses the entire province of Caserta flowing into the Tyrrhenian Sea in Castel Volturno where there’s the mouth. At the beginning I followed the path of the river with no special order and as time went by the idea that any place could be told through some of its peculiarities took place in my mind, things which called my attention and made me emotionally involved. More than two years after the project began, now for me the river is like the long corridor of a large house, whose rooms I enter with respect, then stay, meet its inhabitants, and share with them the purpose of my work. In the large house, there are cozy and sunny rooms, others dark and squalid, but above all, countless people doing their best to live a dignified and fulfilling life. Some of them are immigrants drawn by the dream of a better life. I'm struck by their effort to preserve traditions and cherish the memory of distant families, despite having to struggle to obtain the most basic rights due to strict immigration laws. To my surprise, most of the people I met enthusiastically grant me permission to photograph them because each of them, in their own way, is proud to be seen in the place where they chose to live so I feel this project belongs to all of us. The project is ongoing.