Giovanna Silva, Roma. Never Walk On Crowded Streets, 2021

In this book, Giovanna Silva portrays the city of Rome pre- and post-lockdown. Giovanna Silva arrived in Rome in January 2020 and immediately started walking around the city with just an iPhone (‘it makes everything not only lighter, because I was walking thirty kilometers a day, but also easier and more intimate, allowing me to shoot without being noticed’). Following the suggestions of his personal guides – artists, writers, intellectuals, Romans – she began to know the city, Silva went everywhere on foot (except in Ostia). She returned to certain places several times, photographed with meticulous attention, moved by an unexpected passion for light.

In her photographs we can see from the ruins to the crossroads, from the potholes to the plastic uniforms of the centurions, from Adalberto Libera’s post office to Bernini’s little elephant, even Corviale and Centocelle airport, the Tredicine’s pick-up trucks, Passarelli’s mirror palaces in Via Campania, the shacks of Porta Portese and the columns of the Pantheon, with surreal pairings and contrasts that render a quiet, tropical and vaguely postmodern city.

In the middle part of the book is a small insert with a text by Alberto Savinio, Giovanna Silva’s favorite author, this extract is about the magic of walking and discovering a foreign place. Savinio is also present in the title of the book, ‘never walk on crowded streets’ (a quotation from Pythagoras in Savinio’s text).