This is an ancestral place where time does not flow in a straight line, but settles, returns and persists. Here, the passage of eras and human cycles emerges like sediment: the hidden Etruscan settlements, the now dissolved Roman geometries, the Lombards, the medieval walls, and the successive dominations that never truly tamed this land.
Once a swamp, the Maremma* was a land of fever, isolation and malaria, feared more than inhabited. It is a place that has experienced abandonment and resistance, fatigue and waiting, before slowly coming back to life, becoming fertile and passable once more. Here, history is not celebrated, but traversed. It does not console, but shapes.
This series was conceived as a 'visual serenade' dedicated to my harsh yet generous homeland, the territory from which I come and to which I owe so much. The images do not seek to describe or evoke nostalgia; they seek to listen. They capture the cyclical nature of the landscape and the enduring presence of the past, which continues to emerge silently beneath the light.
“La Maremma è amara. Ci si nasce, ci si muore, e non perdona.”
— Luciano Bianciardi
Maremma Amara by Caterina Bueno
