Andrea Della Vecchia's Parthenope: A Photographic Search for Naples' Imperfect Soul

Visual designer Andrea Della Vecchia has created Parthenope, a photographic project exploring Naples as an 'invisible city.' The project draws inspiration from Italo Calvino's 1949 text 'Freddo a Napoli,' originally published in L'Unità and later collected in the third volume of 'Romanzi e Racconti' (Mondadori, 2002). Della Vecchia describes Naples as a city of desire, idyllic yet marked by decay and violence, whose complexity reinvents the urban paradigm rather than opposing cities like Milan, Rome, or Paris. The photographs were taken with an early-2000s Fujifilm digital camera, deliberately primitive and slow, chosen as a ritual act to embrace imperfection and slowness. The project aims to capture Naples' slow, illusory soul through an analog-like approach, with each shot asking Maradona: 'What are you thinking?' The images compose a slow journey through stories, people, and corners of the city.