“What photography reproduces infinitely has taken place only once”, Roland Barthes wrote in 1980. In those same years Mario Finotti began a visual enquiry, capturing the faces, places and figures of contemporary Novara and beyond. More than forty years after the first shots, this book restores the narrative force of the images, from which stories, anecdotes and atmospheric backstories emerge. Divided into People, Places and Things, it leads the reader through a reflection on time, suspended moments and the forms of reality caught before they slip away: a book about visual memory as an instrument of storytelling and identity.