VARCO APPENNINO - Simone Donati

108 Pages / 23x28 cm

750 copies / Softcover with one flap

Italian and English

Texts by Franco Arminio

Design and edit by Fiorenza Pinna

Published in June 2021 by Witty Books

ISBN 979-12-80177-05-6

€30 for the signed book

€85 for the signed book + 20x25cm "Pietracupa (CB), 2018" signed print

The work is a dialogue with the "Apennines dictionary" of the Irpinian poet and writer Franco Arminio, and it develops from the often repeated phrase addressed to me too many times by the inhabitants of the small villages I visited: "There is nothing here! Why do you come here? "


During my research, which began in 2016 and ended in March 2020, I traveled through the mountain ranges that from Calabria cross Basilicata, Campania and Molise, up to the border with Abruzzo. I worked on the complexity and contradictions contained in this sentence, in this often rich and fertile “nothing”, from a historical and present point of view. A nothingness made of landscapes and history, of gestures and intimacy, of inhabited countryside and slowness, of unfinished buildings as melancholic memories of failed dreams.

After many years dedicated to documenting the collective rites and the great sacred and profane manifestations of contemporary devotion for the book “Hotel Immagine”, I needed to return to the banality of everyday life, made of apparent simplicity and continuity with nature.