Conceived by Luigi Ghirri and released for the first and only time in 1984, it is a cornerstone of contemporary photography history. The ideas that guided it are the manifesto of the Italian landscape school.

In the early 1980s, Luigi Ghirri gathered around him a group of twenty photographers who, since the end of the previous decade, had been experimenting with unconventional ways of representing reality and the social changes taking place throughout the country. This exchange gave birth to the collective exhibition Viaggio in Italia, inaugurated on January 15, 1984, at the Pinacoteca Provinciale di Bari and later reprised in Genoa, Ancona, Rome, Naples, and Reggio Emilia. The exhibition was accompanied by the eponymous volume, designed by Ghirri and Paola Borgonzoni, featuring an essay by Arturo Carlo Quintavalle and a text by Gianni Celati.

In the indeterminacy surrounding the memory of the event, it will be the book itself that consolidates its international critical success and transmits the concept of territory as a system of unsuspected, everyday resources, far removed from the sensationalism of news reporting as from the sweetened panorama of the postcard. As Quintavalle observes: «All postcards are equally unrealistic; they are mythical representations of ideal cities where the reality of living, of managing, of everyday space—the reality of what we now call urban space, furnishings, or interior architecture—is entirely mystified, indeed erased, removed. In postcards, we live the falsehood of our world, a double that is absurd because it does not exist, represents nothing. In short, by sending postcards, we take symbolic journeys, and Ghirri, in his time, made our consciences travel through the history of these fictitious universes».

For years now, no one sends postcards anymore, but the tendency to represent the landscape in an oleographic and virtual key—in the worst sense of the term—has not disappeared; therefore, the invitation to travel by deviating from the single path promoted by maps remains relevant.

The new edition is a facsimile reproduction of the first, published by Il Quadrante of Alessandria in 1984. All details of the original book have been faithfully preserved, adopting the original design, text layout, image sequence, material properties, and page dimensions. To achieve a more adequate rendering of the images, the reproduction of the photographs was carried out from the re-digitization of the original negatives or prints.

The volume is accompanied by a 48-page booklet featuring an essay on the genesis and critical fortune of Viaggio in Italia edited by Matteo Balduzzi, Fabio De Chirico, Gabriella Guerci, and Matteo Piccioni, a note by Adele Ghirri, and translations into French and English of the original texts by Arturo Carlo Quintavalle and Gianni Celati (published in Italian in the book).

Twenty photographers participated in the Viaggio: Olivo Barbieri, Gabriele Basilico, Gianantonio Battistella, Vincenzo Castella, Andrea Cavazzuti, Giovanni Chiaramonte, Mario Cresci, Vittore Fossati, Carlo Garzia, Luigi Ghirri, Guido Guidi, Shelley Hill, Mimmo Jodice, Gianni Leone, Claude Nori, Umberto Sartorello, Mario Tinelli, Ernesto Tuliozi, Fulvio Ventura, Cuchi White.

Project promoted by

Direzione Generale Creatività Contemporanea

del Ministero della Cultura

Mufoco - Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea

(Milano-Cinisello Balsamo)

in collaboration with Archivio Eredi di Luigi Ghirri