The exhibition, like the catalog that accompanies it, launches a precious collaboration between two of the main Italian public institutions dedicated to the conservation, study and dissemination of photography: the Alinari Foundation for Photography in Florence and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Milan – Cinisello Balsamo.

The volume presents the wide selection of images made in both collections and exhibited at the Scuderie del Quirinale, in Rome (1 June - 3 September 2023). The choice covers an extremely broad period of time, coinciding with the history of photography itself: from the beginning, with daguerreotypes, up to the present day with the use of digital and 3D modeling.

The chosen theme is that of the Italian landscape, and how it has been represented in photography: since the first nineteenth-century experiments, through the evolution of expressive language, visual codes and techniques. Over time, the practice of photographers and artists, naturally open to contamination and experimentation, has expanded the very concept of landscape by introducing immaterial dimensions - psychological, poetic, political - which bring about a continuous rereading or reinvention.

The pages of the volume convey the story of the exhibition, animated by a continuous tension between an extraordinary past, which has captured an exceptional coincidence between nature and culture in the Italian landscape, in which we recognize our roots, and a more recent history, marked by rips, wild accelerations, aggressive interventions, dictated by economic development and globalization. Observing the landscape and its transformations through the work of artists constitutes an opportunity to redefine a new Italian cultural identity. The photography of recent years, in fact, also tells us about a new way of communicating the landscape, today very often connected to collective commitment and the ecological question.