The magic lantern, a marvellous instrument and a forerunner of cinema as much as of photography, threw painted forms onto a screen — exotic landscapes, monuments and portraits, and the scenes and visual tales of its sliding plates. For a long time those projections called up distant places, astonished their audience and stirred up memories. Valerio De Paolis is a man of images: a production manager and film producer for many years, and the founder of the distribution house BIM, he has also collected art, painting, sculpture and photography, and his photographic collection now holds many masterpieces shown here for the first time. The book presents more than a hundred works from it along three routes that cross different gazes, spaces, figures and places of our time. In the first section, An idea of woman, the gazes of women and men photographers meet over the female body in a dialogue of seduction, identity and recognition. In the second, An idea of space, a largely urban dimension is studied and measured by major authors. In the last, The space of art, figures of the avant-garde appear in a weave of protagonists and installations.