A.A.V.V., Viaggio in Italia, 2024

On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of its first edition, Quodlibet republishes Viaggio in Italia. Conceived by Luigi Ghirri and first and only published in 1984, it is a cornerstone in the history of contemporary photography. The ideas that guided it are the manifesto of the Italian Landscape School. In the early 1980s Luigi Ghirri gathered around him a group of twenty photographers who had already been experimenting with unconventional ways of representing reality and the social changes taking place almost everywhere in the country since the end of the previous decade. The confrontation would give rise to the group exhibition Viaggio in Italia, which opened on Jan. 15, 1984, at the Pinacoteca Provinciale in Bari and was repeated in Genoa, Ancona, Rome, Naples and Reggio Emilia. The exhibition was accompanied by a volume of the same name, designed by Ghirri and Paola Borgonzoni, with an essay by Arturo Carlo Quintavalle and an essay by Gianni Celati.

In the indeterminacy that shrouds the memory of the event, it will be the book that will consolidate its international critical fortune and convey the concept of territory understood as a system of unsuspected, everyday resources, as far removed from the sensationalism of the news as from the sweetened panorama of the postcard. As Quintavalle observes, “All the postcards are equally unrealistic, they are mythical representations of ideal cities where the reality of living, of managing, of everyday space, the reality of what we now call urban space, furnishings, or interior architecture is completely mystified, indeed erased, removed. We experience in postcards the fake of our world, a double that is absurd because it does not exist, it does not represent anything. We make in short, by sending postcards, symbolic journeys, and Ghirri, in his time, made our consciences travel through the history of these fictitious universes.” For years no one sends postcards anymore, however, the tendency to represent the landscape in an oleographic and virtual way in the deterrent sense of the term has not disappeared, so the invitation to travel by deviating from the only path promoted by maps is still relevant.

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. To achieve a more adequate rendering of the images, the reproduction of the photographs was made from the redigitization 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).

Twenty photographers participated in the Journey: 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.