Piero is not fond of speaking about himself, nor of writing; the very idea makes him uneasy, and he insists it simply doesn’t come naturally to him. His focus is entirely on making photographs, and that is something easy to understand. For this reason, I took on the task of introducing his work. In truth, no elaborate text is needed: one could simply scroll endlessly through his Instagram account (@therainbow_is_underestimated), almost without thinking.

And so one might ask: what is the point?

The point is that today the space of artistic expression is increasingly constrained by expectations and obligations: it must communicate, justify the visibility of an overexposed generation of underemployed creatives, and often present itself as a moral or salvific force. These demands risk making it exhausting, even dull.

What draws me into The rainbow is precisely the absence of all this. It consists of square, colour photographs of a small southern town filled with scenes that are at once ordinary and intimate: women with dyed hair seen from behind, elderly people and children at the sea, homemade food, plastic tables, bare heads, curtains, bodies, neighbours, dogs, family members, closed shutters, old cars.

This world—this expansive, overflowing Sannicandro rich with visual cues—is constantly bathed in a warm light typical of southern latitudes. As a photographer, Piero seems to inhabit his own kind of Eldorado. Light is his gold, and he moves through it with quiet persistence, always searching for the perfect reflective surface, his true subject of desire.

But beyond this lies something more. Piero knows how to see, and therefore, implicitly, how to narrate. Under the pretext of pursuing light, he constructs a personal inner geography populated by spirituality, family bonds, roots, restless wandering, and the search for something undefined yet constantly present. It is a place shaped by suspended time, repetitive days, and the desire to redeem a landscape so as not to imagine it elsewhere—some idealised version of California or any other imagined “better place”.

In short: the South, Italy, us.