The town I grew up in - in the external ring of Padova, where the city merges with the countryside, and somehow is neither one nor the other - was the theatre of my first attempts at photographic documentation. In my early teens, I would walk around the block and photograph trees, silhouettes at sunset, and road signs.

Some of these images are still kept in a folder named Promettente [promising], in a matryoshka of sub-folders and old hard disks’ backups.

Having spent many of my formative years as an adult abroad, over time I found myself trying to fill the gaps that slowly divided me from my home country with a series of photographic projects digging through my personal visual archaeology, mapping what made me who I was and what was so specific about the places, the people and the colours I missed. The concept of home was shaped through images with constant Ulyssean melancholia, many times indulging in small, often overlooked things as if in a sigh. I turned my eye to the close friends I left behind, to the Italianness I left behind, the sun, the summer, the beauty in every corner, but the town I grew up in was always just a flat place in Pianura Padana with no poetry nor appeal, a place that no matter where I would go I was meant to leave for good reason.

After moving back to Italy, I struggled to match the concept of home I carefully built with reality: through repetition, everything seemed to somehow have lost its magic, and I to have lost my ability to capture the same magic and atmosphere in pictures. Slowly reconnecting to my Italian heritage through daily proximity, the connection with my hometown still struggled to happen and therefore was, once again, the most appealing starting point.

15 years after the Promettente folder, Frazione - a part of the whole, is therefore an attempt to make a step further in a layered photographic journey about home and belonging to a place, this time going back to the very center of what is home, re-looking at what I looked at when shaping the very first tools of my photographic eye, reframing the same landscape and objects I had in front of me back then, even reframing the same images, while reframing my concept of home.