The project tOUR emerges from a dialogue between Olivo Barbieri’s photographic archive and a selection of historical volumes preserved in the Malatestiana Library of Cesena. It constructs a visual conversation between contemporary aerial photography and archival imagery, where landscape is understood as a stratified field shaped by multiple temporalities, perspectives and systems of representation.

Barbieri’s images of contemporary Italian landscapes, often captured from elevated viewpoints, reveal territories marked by layered interventions in which natural and artificial elements overlap. These compositions expose underlying historical structures while also bringing forward unexpected visual correspondences within the contemporary environment.

In counterpoint, illustrations drawn from ancient volumes selected from the library’s collections introduce historical modes of depiction—maps, city views and architectural representations—that reflect earlier ways of understanding and organising space. This interplay generates a visual mirror between past and present, expanding the reading of landscape beyond a single temporal frame.

Through this analogical structure, the work traces processes of sedimentation and transformation, highlighting how the Italian landscape is continuously rewritten through overlapping images, histories and cultural imaginaries.