COLOR / 35mm / 4:6 / 2023

Bagni is the story of the Rimini beach during the winter season. For eight months I took pictures of abandoned bathing huts, buildings, constructions and objects, in search of their vanished life, forgotten by the past season. With 158 photos, the story examines the silent hidden side of the Romagna Riviera in winter, discovering and revealing its inevitable deterioration. Places halfway between past and present, which for decades have led a cycle of life and death similar to that of all living beings. Death in winter, life in summer.

Each photo is the product of a 1982 Fujica, which belonged to my mother. In about two years I have used 19 camera rolls, for a total of 684 negatives, deprived of people and animals.

But Bagni is not just this. It is also a systematic cataloging project of the current beach reality of Rimini: for each beach service there is a photo, which shows its essence and frees it from a common mistaken vision.

So that the wonder of these places does not exist only during the summer holidays.

“The winter landscape of the Riviera appears as the waste of something that is no longer needed, and people will do without it forever. A bathing hut stripped by the cold wind of the storm is in itself much more definitive than an act of death. It speaks of something that was there, of a sun that had illuminated it, of men or replicants who had used it. Nobody would believe that, with the new season, like the trees, it will bloom again for life.”

Fuori stagione — Un weekend postmoderno,
Pier Vittorio Tondelli (1985)