Giovanni Maria Sacco makes an absorbing photographic journey through Italy. The book is full of black-and-white pictures, many of them shot on large-format film, that rebuild the features of Italian rationalist architecture and of places that are mysterious and estranging. The images carry a strong emotional charge even though the buildings, monuments and churches are stripped of ornament, wholly bare, which is to say reduced to their true essence — an essence that goes beyond time, because the truth of things is eternal. The author approaches things through photography in order to reveal what lies past appearance. Metaphysics concerns what goes beyond the physical universe we perceive; here the camera becomes an instrument for making metaphors and for describing what for the author is metaphysics or, as the oxymoron in the title suggests, a concrete metaphysics. The architectural archetypes, from the arch to pillars and columns, are immune to the passing of time. And then there is the human condition: in these pictures the architecture stands out — the rationalist buildings of Tresigallo, Burri’s Cretto, the Terrazza Mascagni in Livorno — but the human figure is absent.