Viaggio in Italia

Viaggio in Italia, conceived by Luigi Ghirri and published in 1984, is a milestone in contemporary Italian photography, representing the ‘manifesto’ of the Italian Landscape School from the 1980s onward. It tells the story of a generation of photographers who moved away from exotic travel, sensationalist reportage and formalist analysis to focus on the everyday Italian landscape. This shift replaced the cliché of Italy as a unique and wonderful place with an “anti-heroic, anti-mythical, everyday and non-rhetorical” image, as Gabriele Basilico noted. Twenty photographers, many of whom have won international awards, participated: Olivo Barbieri, Gabriele Basilico, Gianantonio Battistella, Vincenzo Castella, Andrea Cavazzuti, Giovanni Chiaramonte, Mario Cresci, Vittore Fossati, Carlo Garzia, Guido Guidi, Luigi Ghirri, Shelley Hill, Mimmo Jodice, Gianni Leone, Claude Nori, Umberto Sartorello, Mario Tinelli, Ernesto Tuliozi, Fulvio Ventura, and Cuchi White. The volume includes an essay by Arturo Carlo Quintavalle and an article by Gianni Celati.

The new edition is a facsimile reproduction of the first one, published by Il Quadrante of Alexandria in 1984. All details of the original book have been faithfully preserved, adopting the design, text layout and sequence of the original images, material properties and page size. In order to achieve a more adequate rendering of the images, the reproduction of the photographs was made from the digitization of the original negatives or prints. The volume is accompanied by a 48-page booklet with an essay on the genesis and critical fortune of Viaggio in Italia edited by Matteo Balduzzi, Fabio De Chirico, Gabriella Guerci, and Matteo Piccioni, a note by Adele Ghirri, and French and English translations of the original texts by Arturo Carlo Quintavalle and Gianni Celati (published in Italian in the book).

Photographs by Olivo Barbieri, Gabriele Basilico, Gianantonio Battistella, Vincenzo Castella, Andrea Cavazzuti, Giovanni Chiaramonte, Mario Cresci, Vittore Fossati, Carlo Garzia, Luigi Ghirri, Guido Guidi, Shelley Hill, Mimmo Jodice, Gianni Leone, Claude Nori, Umberto Sartorello, Mario Tinelli, Ernesto Tuliozi, Fulvio Ventura, Cuchi White