Sicily, 2010
Palermo (Sicily), July 2010, time of the religious festival dedicated to the patron saint of the city: Santa Rosalia (“u fistinu”). A careful tour around the most significant neighbourhoods reveals the great faith and the strong devotion of the people towards the patron saint. Improvised altars of saints, candles, flowers appear everywhere, in the most unlikely places, and silently live together with the daily events of the Palermitans, blending within and disappearing in the background of this wonderful theater of life, full of loud sounds, smells and tastes that arouse strong emotions. A grotesque mix of sacred and profane.
As a Sicilian, I know myself how faith conditions any aspect of our lives; This series, in fact, tries to communicate, through the metaphor of images, how the historical roots and traditions are so far in time that today we can see a curious and sometime grotesque mix of worship objects and symbols with everyday life.