Una Vita. A Life - A young project which tells the story of those who lived Italian history
Usually young people are not interested in elderly people’s lives, but exceptions always exist. One of these exceptions is confirmed by Alberto Pepe and Veronica Olivotto. These two young and successful people, created a very interesting project, named "Una Vita".
Alberto is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Astrophysics and at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science of Harvard University. He was born in Italy but he left his country since he was nineteen, to study in London. Afterwards he moved to LA and then to Boston. Veronica Olivotto is an Urban Researcher at the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam; she currently works in the International Projects Team.
With this project, Alberto and Veronica, want to highlight those elderly people who have lived the first part of the Nation's 150 years with all their traumatic and painful experiences. The country and its people changed radically in the past 75 years. The majority of the Italian population moved from small rural towns to large urban centers. Nevertheless some people still go on living in small rural towns, so Alberto and Veronica, in July 2011, decided to start an interesting trip from Piedmont to Apulia to visit and to know, through photography, these people who lived such an important part of the Italian history.
They said: “We drove for two weeks, from Piedmont to Apulia, intentionally avoiding big cities, highways, and popular itineraries. We took back roads and country lanes, where we met a generation whose age roughly corresponds to that of Italy's ruling elite but whose stories are profoundly different. We met ordinary people with extraordinary life stories. Stories of suffering and longing, daring and thriving. "Una Vita" is a tribute to their lives and memories”.
The first question that everybody would ask is: Why two young people, with a successful carrier, decided to come back to Italy to take pictures and to listen to some elderly Italian people who actually live in rural small towns, mostly not known? The answer is simpler than expected: Italy is a beautiful country but nowadays, it is going through a difficult period, especially in relation to culture. The new generations are growing up with bad role models, who show that the easiest way to success is not perseverance on study and work, but easy money and material things. But thanks to these kind of projects, we can know different stories of Italian life. Which tool would have been better than photography.
"Una Vita" has been realized using a Canon 7D with 50mm lens and a Mamiya 456, medium format. The project has been self-funded and no-profit.
We wish good luck to this project, hoping that it will be shown in many cities in Italy and abroad.
For more information please visit http://unavitaphoto.com
Valentina Calabrese
contributor
