With A Beautiful Place, photographer Alessandro Mallamaci starts from a precise place: the valley of the Sant’Agata stream, a ribbon of water that crosses the Aspromonte and flows into the Strait of Messina. It is a territory whose very name carries an ancient legacy, tied to beauty and nobility, yet today it tells very different stories. Mallamaci calls it “my landscape,” and that phrase alone makes it clear this is not just observation, but an inevitable love—one that can be aching and difficult at the same time.

His photographs are a journey through the Calabria he knows best: of grand vistas and deep wounds, of folk traditions and the traces left by the ’Ndrangheta, of nature that endures and concrete that crumbles. A place of constant contrasts, where the village festival and rust coexist, grazing and collapsing walls, silence and memory. Mallamaci looks without moralizing, avoiding direct denunciation in favor of seeking empathy with his subject. It is as if every shot were an act of care—a way to turn unease into visual poetry.

His gaze converses with that of the masters who have redefined landscape photography since the 1980s—from Luigi Ghirri to Guido Guidi, and on to Stephen Shore and Robert Adams. This is not quotation, but a shared sensibility: that of someone trying to narrate a territory that has lost the marvels of the Grand Tour yet retains a fragile, secret allure.

With this project, Mallamaci builds a diary that is both personal and collective, guiding us through a Calabria unlike the one on postcards or in clichés. A Calabria that endures, that suffers, that surprises. A “very beautiful place” that, in his images, becomes a love letter—and that asks viewers to let themselves be moved by its contradictions.

Alessandro Mallamaci’s photographs are on view at the Fotografia Calabria Festival through October 12.