The Wandering is, above all, an intimate and visual diary — a quiet narrative where the act of photographing intertwines with the author’s life, becoming both experience and shared thread. Francesca Volpato invites us to follow her on a pilgrimage through the landscapes of the Euganean Hills, where nature once again becomes that unchanging backdrop that welcomes our thoughts. These photographs are immersions into fragments of time and silence, where wandering becomes a liberating gesture, almost a necessary breath. Each image is a passage, a stage in a journey that seeks not a destination, but a state of being.

In the photographer’s gaze lies a longing for calm — rediscovered — which manifests most clearly when the camera seems to disappear, allowing space for surrender. Volpato, mother and woman, moves through the environment, listens to it. Hers is a phytocentric vision, an “arboreal” one: less analytical, more sensory, immersive — almost vegetal. As if, at a certain point, knowledge was no longer enough, and something else was needed: a different form of understanding, or of being understood, of being situated. In this context, photography becomes a tool of communion with nature, of participating in a shared breath upon the earth.

Alongside her, we see her young daughters. Their presence, discreet yet essential, is a powerful reminder of wonder. The child’s gaze brings back into the world a forgotten quality: the ability to marvel, to see beyond the mere functionality of things. In Volpato’s photography, nature becomes fairytale once more. A hole in the ground becomes a vortex, the ridge of a hill the back of a sleeping giant, a twisted branch comes alive like a mythological serpent, while a shrub tangles like a ball of thoughts, and the abundant berries of a bush become an unexplored galaxy. Objects take on symbolic potential, become infused with imagination. It is the perspective of childhood that returns to guide us, suggesting that the world is still full of secrets, of danger, of possibility, of the unknown — if only we chose to look.

In The Wandering, one senses a desire — almost physical — to stop explaining, to let things simply be. To get lost in order to be found. To see without possessing, offering us a way of looking that moves through listening. Her images do not shout, they settle. They remain.  And with them, the desire to be — more deeply.