Barbara Di Maio's 'Chianda e Ndrezza' Documents Women's Onion Cultivation in Cilento

Barbara Di Maio, a photographer and conference interpreter born in Salerno in 1974, has created 'Chianda e Ndrezza', a photographic project presented in 2025 at the Talents section of the International Festival of Photojournalism in Padua. The project documents the cultivation of the Vatolla onion, a biodiversity presidium in the small Cilento village of Vatolla, where women have planted and woven for generations. The title, from the Cilento dialect meaning 'plant and weave', encapsulates the project's focus on the complete cycle of onion farming, accompanied by traditional songs passed down from mother to daughter, including invocations against the evil eye. Di Maio's work, rooted in over a decade of visual anthropology of Southern Italy, emphasizes women's roles in traditional communities. She studied at the ICP in New York and earned a Master's in Photojournalism at the Scuola Romana di Fotografia. Her photography is participatory, not observational, aiming to create a visual archive of practices at risk of disappearing. The project is part of a broader research on masks, historical carnivals of Campania, and religious processions, always centering women, building a visual atlas of the South that chooses testimony over nostalgia.