The Ephemeral

Gran Sasso d’Italia, 2015/2016

text by Alberto Bazzucchi

Already in a letter from 1972 addressed to his friend Pasquale Scarpitti, Ennio Flaiano described the internal Abruzzo as "an island crushed between an exemplary sea and two mountains ... the Gran Sasso and the Majella ...". Almost forty years later, Paolo Rumiz, in the story of a long crossing through the most hidden places of the Alps and the Apennines, often uses words like "islands", "sperm whales", "archipelago" and names the book that will come out "The legend of the sailing mountains ".

Even if only distractedly flying over them, the images that Antonio Di Cecco dedicates to the Gran Sasso give the impression that the mountain cannot exist without some marine metaphor. The disciplined movement of a landing place, the enveloping gloom of the night sea, a sailing ship, perhaps. A patient observation to capture not the fixity but the precariousness, the fragility. To achieve this you don't have to feel like someone who wants to stop something, capture it, perhaps to have something to show or even teach. You have to quit arrogance. Living those places with intimacy and distance. Nothing else needs to be done. The issue is height. But the gaze that derives from it, dwell on a swarm of clouds that slips through the valleys or rises towards the starry darkness, is not arrogant, it does not have a wishful physiology. It is not so much the dwelling of the lens on the landscape in itself, but letting the landscape pass through the lens. In quiet wandering, he likes to feel the path under his feet, in the air that never stands still. A discipline. An oscillating form of attention, in which the observer and the observed object often come to change roles. In that moment, the environment investigates the moods of the beholder.