cover: Italy. Potenza, Basilicata. 2019. Via Pretoria, street scene.
Mezzogiorno is at once an hour and a place. In Italian, the word indicates the moment when the sun reaches its peak; and the South as a cardinal point, as a region, as a collective imaginary. Photographer Marco Zanella, part of the Cesura collective, chose this title for a photographic project spanning more than ten years — and the choice is no accident: that semantic doubleness is precisely the tension running through the entire body of work.
Thirtieth anniversary of the Capaci massacre, in which Giovanni Falcone lost his life, together with his wife Francesca Morvillo and escort officers Vito Schifani, Rocco Dicillo and Antonio Montinaro, killed in the Mafia bombing of 23 May 1992.
Born in Parma in 1984 and trained photographically as an assistant to Alex Majoli, Marco Zanella began travelling through Southern Italy in 2012, the year that laid the foundations for his ongoing project. Like many photographers, he is searching for something difficult to find: a silent presence that allows contradictions to exist without being resolved. Landscapes marked by the unfinished, suspended architectures, rituals that persist. Elements that coexist within a single frame without any one of them prevailing over the others. In the meantime, in 2018 he documented Cotignola, a project that resulted in the book Scalandrê, published in 2021 and awarded the Amilcare G. Ponchielli Prize. He currently lives and works in Pianello Val Tidone.
During a strike of seasonal migrant workers in the agricultural fields of the Capitanata area.
Torretta Antonacci is one of the largest informal settlements in Southern Italy, commonly referred to as a “ghetto.” Built from scrap materials, tents and self-constructed shacks, it hosts hundreds of migrant labourers employed in tomato harvesting and other seasonal crops.
The project was presented at the Circulation(s) festival in Paris, which recently came to a close, and which since 2011 has been exploring the present through the eyes of emerging European photographers. Within the festival context — twenty-six artists, fifteen nationalities, visions often in contrast with one another — Mezzogiorno brought something difficult to classify: not documentary, not visual essay, not elegy. Rather an attempt to build a photographic language that is at once politically conscious and emotionally open.
Because midday, as a time of day, is also the moment when there are no shadows. There is nowhere to hide. The light is flat, total, unforgiving. And it is precisely there, in that inescapable light, that Marco Zanella found the most honest way to look at a territory that Italy continues to misread.
Annual pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Polsi during the Festa della Madonna della Montagna, a deeply rooted religious gathering held each September in the heart of the Aspromonte mountains.
Beyond its spiritual significance, the sanctuary has also been historically linked to meetings of the ‘Ndrangheta, adding a complex layer of power, ritual and symbolism to this remote mountain pilgrimage.
An underground bunker, part of a dense web of hidden rooms and tunnels in the area, used for years as shelters for ‘Ndrangheta fugitives, and systematically searched by the Carabinieri “Cacciatori di Calabria.”
Platì is a small town in the Locride area, part of the so-called triangle of San Luca, Africo and Platì, territories historically considered a pivotal stronghold of the ‘Ndrangheta.
A small town in the Locride area, part of the so-called triangle of San Luca, Africo and Platì, territories historically considered a pivotal stronghold of the ‘Ndrangheta.
