Ephemeral

Antonio Di Cecco recounts the “fluctuating” landscape of the Gran Sasso mountains, in Italy, and the sky over them, fascinating and fragile.

Ever since a letter addressed to his friend Pasquale Scarpitti in 1972, Ennio Flaiano had described Inner Abruzzo as “an island crushed between an exemplary sea and two mountains – the Gran Sasso and the Majella….” About forty years later, Paolo Rumiz telling about his long passage to the most hidden places on the Alpes and Appenines often uses words as “islands”, “spermwhale”, “archipelago” and he calls his book The Legend of the Sailing Mountains.

Even if you absently fly over the pictures that Antonio Di Cecco devotes to the Gran Sasso, they convey the feeling that the mountain can’t be pictured otherwise than using a sea metaphor. Perhaps the regular movement of a landing, the enchanting darkness of the sea at night, a sailing ship. A patient observation to catch the precariousness and the fragility rather than the steadiness. If you want to get it, you don’t have to feel as the one who tries to stop or catch something, just in order to have something to show or even worse to teach. You have to put aside arrogance. You have to dwell in those places with intimacy and distance. You don’t need to do anything more.

The matter is the height. But the look that follows is never haughty or unrealistic, whether if it lingers over a swarm of clouds slipping out the valleys or it rises towards the starry darkness. What matters isn’t the lingering of the objective lens over the landscape, but to let the landscape into the objective lens. He loves feeling the path under his feet in his quiet wandering and in the air which is never still. A discipline. A swinging form of attention in which the observer and the observed thing often change their roles. Then it is the landscape that investigates the feelings of the people looking at it. Alberto Bazzucchi