With the Atlante (Atlas) series, Luigi Ghirri created an "imaginary journey" through the walls of his home: the protagonists are the details of the images of a geographical atlas, which become the subject of the photographs, losing their descriptive function and transforming into pure abstractions. Luigi Ghirri was obsessed by atlas:
“Travelling on a geographic map, a precious activity for many writers, is one of the most natural gestures for each one of us, since childhood. The inevitable ideas that come to mind, the overlap of images, automatically guide the thoughts."
- Luigi Ghirri

Atlante represented a key moment in the author's career and in the history of Italian photography: it represents one of the first attempts to rethink the concept of "landscape" through photography.

Luigi Ghirri created the Atlas project in 1973. The system of signs – mountains, lakes, cities, etc. - adopted by an atlas is universally accepted and rests on conventions that allow no arbitrary interpretation: Luigi Ghirri approaches these signs by considering them like any other object in his daily experience and thus believing himself free to read them. The research method adopted is that of macro-photography, that is, the opposite of the blow-up technique. But the author does not give us an enlarged view of the same detail; he moves as if on a journey across the surface of the globe.
As the author himself states on the sidelines of the project, "the only possible journey seems to be within the signs, the images: in the destruction of direct experience."