This work is about a journey. Not only physical, but also spiritual, made of experiences and feelings. Carried out over many years and through hundred places, and yet timeless and motionless. A deep dive into the human soul.

Life brought me to witness suffering and cruelty. It had been my choice, and my job was to fight that cruelty and to alleviate that suffering. To almost no avail, and to my utmost frustration. Humanitarian work took its toll on my soul.

Photography became my healing escape. It led me to reconcile my soul with what was outside myself. With humankind. With nature. With life. Each act of taking a photo has been an instant of relief, maybe only one hundredth of a second long, but it has also been the final moment in a long process of reaching out again and getting closer to the rest of the world.

Photography has been for me like a bridge, a way to wordlessly talk to people, communicating only through shared feelings and common sensations.

Working on this project, with my mind wandering again through all those experiences and atmospheres, something casual made me suddenly remember my high school years, the studies of ancient cultures and the old Greek language. My Mediterranean soul, again… A word came up to my mind: Pathos. That is the ability to inspire emotions in the audience by means of an empathic appeal.

I always felt the Pathos around me when photographing: the subjects of my images had the magical power to attract me, to evoke in me all sort of feelings. A call that I could not but answer.

This work is permeated by the duality of Good and Evil, which is always sharpened during wartime and which I have experienced first hand. For me, the photographic process became a “rediscovery” of the world through a critical lens: the one that allows to see the coexistence of Good and Evil everywhere and in everyone, often in metaphorical form, but without pessimism or moral judgments, simply as a fact. I looked for violence where there seemed to be peace and poetry where there should only be pain.

Without any journalistic or documentary goals, I limited myself to meeting people, animals and to merging into the environment, always looking for an empathetic contact with the subjects of my photos which were sometimes the result of very long waiting and even longer conversations.

I have been walking a long way, listening to the voices and the emotions welcoming my footsteps… the ambiguous yet unforgettable beauty of fallen angels, while smiling devils were winking at me from behind a corner… a mirror sending back to me reflections of tenderness and compassion, sadness and passion, desolation and joy.

So many shadows and so many sun rays.

Pathos has been my companion all along my photographic journey.