Religion is a human expression based on the unbreakable bond between our self and consciousness, knowledge and existence. In particular, the mutualism between creed’s materialization (rituals and symbolism) and society is perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects of this complex relationship. Like many of us, we were all born into a religion, accustomed from childhood to traditions, rituals, and symbols, which our eyes and mind have often perceived and accepted inertly. A sort of pre-packaged bundle that is given to us at birth, with all the answers at hand. A Euclidean geometry where the answers are certain and the axioms incontrovertible and in which the whole community recognizes and reflects itself, because society and religion are each other, mutually emanation and creation.

These premises have led me to explore the anthropological implications of such a phenomenon. An investigation free of judgment, with the sole goal of diving into and depicting a condition from which no one is exempt, not even those professing atheism. Just as our lives have been more or less consciously marked by the religious calendar through commanded holidays, so we have found ourselves in a landscape profoundly altered by religious manifestations. Think about it. Is there any mountain without a cross planted on top? Is there any square with no sacred images? Is there any house with no crucifix or holy cards? Is there a village in the lower Po Valley without its "Don Camillo’s" church? If you happen to live in a Christian society, you might safely guess the answer is “no”.

My journey in search of these visible signs, places, and icons starts from this very awareness. There is no denying such artifacts can tell a great deal about the ethos of our religion-rooted culture, much more than philosophy would. As the saying goes, if the philosopher is the lover of Doubt, the priest is the prophet of Truth. Interestingly, not even in the crafty Western World do we stop dealing with the pervasiveness of this human expression. Indeed, the supposedly secular third-millennium society often strives to maintain a fragile balance between faith and laicism. As a result, we constantly witness the creation of new iconographies, often poised between sacred and profane. Since modern communities now manage religious references and symbols much more comfortably and cynically, more and more people dare to cross over into satire as a sign of intellectual freedom.

At the other end of the spectrum we find orthodoxy, the expression of a stoic naïve niche that resists change to a great extent, though its modern declinations often generate awkward contrasts with a kitsch flavour. This collection of images tries to portray how our beliefs become part of the landscape, whether extemporaneous or planned and reasoned. These manifestations transform the ordinary into extraordinary, enclosing local or regional characteristics that make them strongly identified with the historical and geographical context they come from. Therefore, there is no pretension to evaluate faith, beauty, sincerity or hypocrisy. Instead, the only goal here is documenting reality, a world in which many people can recognize themselves but on which, perhaps, they have never dwelt so much.