could be of a bill-hook embedded in a chestnut block. I replied with what I knew. “It’s nice, though!” she would repeat. Yes, nice, my girl. But even nicer is the
Both the landscapes and the people in the photos become mosaics of sensations fact that a photograph of your places in the mountains make you speak. As beautiful as it is there, night or day, with snow, sun, fog, rain, wind, there is someone, in an era when images have become a choral delirium, who can understand the authentic feel of living in the Apennine mountains of Tuscany and Emilia. ☜
NATURART | DICEMBRE 2017 | 39
Above all, he was good at identifying the backs of the mountains, calling them by name: Monte Gennaio, Spigolino, Libro Aperto... Often, he added comments about where they were and when he too had climbed them. There was never a regretful wistfulness in his words, but something that, through the image, took him back to those places he told of having visited so many years ago. This, I thought is how Maurizio’s photography lends itself to being a — kind of bridge that goes beyond the The day I was in Piteglio (where Maurizio had his show), there were also a abyss separating generations, an ideal girl and an old man. I was looking at the walkway that connects men and women pictures and, from time to time, I would separated in time and space. The girl seemed distracted. She was little happen to hear the two of them talking. more than a child and perhaps that There must have been seventy years was why she seemed to still have an air of difference in age between them. Yet hearing the comments drawn from them of amazement. Every now and then, by those photos drew, they did not seem I found myself shoulder to shoulder to belong to two such distant eras. with her and, before some of Maurizio’s Naturally, the old man had an advantage photos, she would ask me where that trail led, what the men gathered around as he recognized the ancient customs of the fire were doing, or what the meaning chestnut groves and grazing animals. resistance, fatigue, or constructive nostalgia. Then there is the poetry that is needed in this increasingly cynical and “overexplained” world – and it is there in these photos. All emotions are there. Above all, there is the life of the Apennines – and of the past, rooted by the continual succession of the generations who preceded us in these mountains.