Gianni Celati, occasional writer, translator of Joyce, intellectual, professor, almost like a guru teaching us about the landscape.

In one of the most beautiful passages of this book/review, there is a series of stories about space, research into spaces, and the urgent need to open up new visions of passion in literature.

This refined monographic review dedicates each part to an important personality from the world of culture, from Giacometti to Perec, from Picasso to Giorgio Manganelli, bringing together lost texts, newspaper articles, interviews, prefaces, and radio conversations, helping us not just to understand the author, Gianni Celati, but also the entire cultural world of that period.

In fact, it is a story that is tied to one of the greatest photographers of the last century: Luigi Ghirri.

Luigi Ghirri (1943 – 1992), photographer, master of Italian landscape photography.

Kodachrome was Ghirri’s first book and was published in 1978 through Punto e Virgola, a publishing house that had been set up the year before together with Ernesto Tuliozzi, Ornella Corradini, and Susetta Sirotti. In this provocatively titled book, Ghirri looked at the medium of photography itself, taking the name of one of the most widely used photographic films of that time. The images reflect the need to understand the landscape and the dimensions it takes on in comparison to the void, the context, and the external world, a new way of communicating space through the communicative value of a white background. Returning to these intuitions, Ghirri revisited the poetry of the Italian landscape in the 1980s, ‘wiping away’ the idea of Italy portrayed in literature and on postcards by organising a legendary journey together with a group of photographers such as Jodice, Basil, Guidi, Chiaramonte, and others who went on to rewrite the history of this image, alongside his dear friend Gianni Celati.