Frank Cancian's 1957 Photographs of Southern Italy on View in Rome

A new exhibition at the Museo delle Civiltà in Rome presents Frank Cancian's black-and-white photographs of Lacedonia, a town in the province of Avellino, taken in 1957 over six months. The American photographer, born in Stafford Springs in 1934, captured the daily life, festivals, and people of this rural community, creating an anthropological, poetic, and visual focus on a vanished world. The images evoke an ancestral silence, revealing smiles, whispers, fears, prayers, and fatigue. Subjects include laborers and widows on their doorsteps, with details like whitewashed walls, clothing as alter egos, black shawls, hats, and votive images underscoring human finitude. Cancian's work is compared to Federico Patellani's 1952 photographs of Benevento, part of Italy's 'magic' tradition. The project stemmed from Cancian's biographical need to trace his ancestral roots in Italy, allowing him to immerse himself in the local social fabric of a region between Puglia and Lucania, also explored by ethnologist Ernesto De Martino. Cancian lived among the people of Lacedonia, recording their experiences from harvests to pilgrimages and Sunday gatherings at the bar. Scholar Francesco Faeta noted that Cancian sought to convey both a scientific path and his aesthetic care, with an experimental drive. The images, long unpublished, are described as hypnotic and intimate, like private diary entries. The exhibition is curated by Fabio Petrelli.