"Memory is the place of life," says Italo Zannier — for him at least, and he believes for everyone, in the night-time secret of the deep self, the one that sometimes comes back in dreams and goes out at the first gleam of light. A thinker of photography and an innocent photographer, as he likes to call himself, Zannier is an intellectual, a teacher and a photographer, the first holder of a chair in the history of photography in Italy and a reference point for the recognition of the discipline in the country. Here he offers a short but intense account, in pictures and words, of his long life: a life spent as a great scholar and passionate collector of photography, marked by devotion to a dream and studded with discoveries, acquaintances, meetings, visions and a great deal of writing, with the photographic freeze-frame always as the thread. The book comes in a double format that encloses at its centre a smaller insert of words and pictures. The route Zannier builds runs backwards, from photofanie made in digital colour to the neo-realist black and white of his early years — as though leading us from what is made by machine, with the instantaneity of a compact or a phone, to what is made by hand, with negatives and developing acids — and then brings us back to the present. He guides us through a dive into recollection where we meet people, anecdotes and the visions of an artist who in more than seventy years of work has never tired of testing himself against the photographic image, an instrument of memory and a diary of how a personal, human way of looking has evolved.