Book presentation + books display in our shopwindow Varco Appennino, by Simone Donati curated and designed by Fiorenza Pinna published by Witty Books

I visit villages to understand how they are doing.
But even prior to that, I visit them to understand where they are located: on a mountain or a plateau, in a valley or in the plain.
Villages speak, as everything does, and they speak primarily through geography. They are land to be read – even though they lost many words – and to be written about.
Franco Arminio

Varco Appennino (Apennines passage) is an exploration of the inner areas of the Italian Southern Apennines, those hidden, remote, away from the clichés and chronicles that often characterize this part of the country.
The work is a dialogue with the Apennine Vocabulary by the Irpinian poet and writer Franco Arminio, it develops from the often repeated phrase addressed to Simone Donati by the inhabitants of the small villages he visited: “There is nothing here! Why do you come here? “

During his research, began in 2016 and ended in March 2020, he traveled through the mountain ranges that from Calabria cross Basilicata, Campania and Molise, up to the border with Abruzzo.
He worked on the complexity and contradictions contained in this sentence, in this often rich and fertile “nothing”, from a historical and present point of view. A nothingness made of landscapes and history, of gestures and intimacy, of inhabited countryside and slowness, of unfinished buildings as melancholic memories of failed dreams.

The work is constructed through an alternation of suspended landscapes, timeless but equally impressive, and by a series of portraits of those who still live in those territories and populate them because they never left or because they returned, them: solid and present. The interiors of the houses, intimate and silent, are added to the landscapes and portraits, together with small marginal landscapes.

Simone Donati (Italy, 1977) completed the three-year course in photography at the Studio Marangoni in Florence in 2005. After an internship at Magnum Photos in New York, in 2006 he started working in the field of documentary photography.
During the years 2009-2015 his attention has focused on the political and social situation of Italy which resulted in Hotel Immagine his first self-published book. His latest body of work, Varco Appennino, was published by Witty Books in Spring 2021.
His photographs have been part of solo and group shows in Italy and abroad and have been published in the main italian and international magazines.
Simone is one of the founders of TerraProject collective, which has been working on social, political and environmental issues in Italy and abroad since 2006.