Luigi Ghirri and Gianni Celati's 'Viaggio in Italia' Revisited Through a Contemporary Walk

Arianna Tremolanti's essay, developed for NABA's Critical Writing course in 2021/2022, retraces the spirit of Luigi Ghirri and Gianni Celati's early 1980s 'Viaggio in Italia' by describing a contemporary walk along the Ticinello canal near Milan. The original project, initiated by Ghirri, involved Celati and other photographers traveling through the Po Valley by bus and on foot, capturing unposed subjects and fleeting stories. Ghirri's photographic gaze and Celati's 'observation tales' shared a poetics of the already-seen, rejecting spectacular imagery in favor of a sustainable, non-predatory look. Tremolanti contrasts this with today's 'unsustainable' gaze, linked to capitalist realism and technological excess. She notes that the white web covering the trees during her walk is from the fall webworm, an invasive North American moth that arrived in the Po Valley in the late 1980s due to rising global temperatures, destroying vegetation and requiring chemical pesticides. The essay draws on references from Marco Belpoliti, Ugo Fracassa, and Celati's own writings, and was published on Artribune in March 2022.