Pasquale Bove, Luca Santese, ITALY & ITALY, 2016

The Italy&Italy project arose from a meeting between Pasquale Bove, photojournalist, and Luca Santese, photographer and co-founder of Cesura.

From Bove’s vast archives, comprising more than 250,000 shots, Santese selected 306 produced between 1985 and 2000 as the conceptual cornerstones of Italy&Italy, following precise editing criteria.
The central intent of Santese’s editing in the Bove’s archive was to create and organically articulate the iconography of those years starting from a fragment of them: the everyday and social life of Rimini and its environs. In the ‘80s, and particularly in the following decade, the character of Rimini was representative as a paradigm of what could be called “Italian-ness”.

In Rimini both the prominent politicians who frequented the discos and the thousands of working class people coming from every Italian city and province all felt right at home. Bove has photographed hundreds of situations and environments that are radically different from each other without political or social class distinctions. This project thus conveys different feelings, moods, memories, joys, and sorrows.