There are two kinds of summer. On one side, the glossy, seemingly perfect version made of umbrellas lined up in neat rows, spotless beaches, enviable bodies, glowing skin. On the other, a truer and hungrier one, that smells of sun cream burning into skin, of towels laid out on rocky shores, of naps taken under a scorching sun. Photographer Ciro Silvestre, on Instagram @cisilv, has chosen to focus on the latter with his ongoing project titled Mediterraneo Fever. Through these shots, Ciro reminds us that the sea and its beaches belong to everyone, and it’s precisely these everyone who end up at the centre of his lens, without filters or studied poses.

Bodies surrendering to the sun on makeshift towels, skin marked by time, small everyday gestures. These are seemingly ordinary details that, observed closely, become dense testimonies of humanity, stories of relationships, summer rituals, generational contrasts, unintentional irony and moments of pure spontaneity captured without any staging.

The project moves across different Mediterranean coastlines with a gaze that constantly shifts between social documentation and an almost painterly attention to composition, playing with different planes. Cities, languages and countries change, but the beaches of the Mediterranean share something universal, made of physical closeness, forced coexistence and everyday life shared among strangers.

Mediterraneo Fever observes with honesty what happens in a place where people let their guard down more than anywhere else, simply allowing themselves to be. It’s in this suspension of social conventions that Ciro Silvestre finds the heart of his work, and the beach becomes a great equaliser, where cultural differences and surprising similarities coexist within the same square metre of sand or rock, under the same sun that spares no one.