Short story: I Gelsi (The Mullberries)

Published in the book Abitare il deserto (Osservatorio fotografico, Ravenna 2016)

"Thirty years after the Traversate del deserto (Desert Crossings) Gianni Celati conducted in 1986 and which by now constitute a classic work on the relationship between photography and literature, with the participation of prestigious authors such as Jean Baudrillard, Max Frisch, Gerald Bisinger, Giorgio Agamben. Giuliano Scabia, Luigi Ghirri, Guido Guidi, Olivo Barbieri, Vittore Fossati and Klaus Kinold), we have asked a number of young authors to express their point of view about environmental and cultural desertification.

Along the pages of Abitare il deserto (Inhabiting the Desert), nine narrators and nine photographers, with great simplicity, rejecting to utter a sharp cry of condemnation and the intrusiveness of special effects, brings up questions on which we, immersed in our comfortable carelessness, should reflect.

It's the meeting between the desert of the mind and the visible desert, the inside and the outside, shared by poets, writers and photographers with the aim of revealing their world view: in the end all have found out that the place envisioned by our mind becomes one with the place that hosts us, enriching it with new meanings.

Despite everything, there is still so much beauty to preserve."

– Giovanni Zaffagnini