A photographic reportage introduced by a text from Giosuè Calaciura. In the sixties the young photographer showed this set of pictures to the publisher Robert Delpire, who offered at once to bring them out as the third volume of the Encyclopédie essentielle, a collection pairing text and images that already held Les Américains by Robert Frank of 1958 and Les Allemands by René Burri of 1962. Circumstances at the time kept the book from being made, but the Italian portfolio convinced the members of Magnum Photos enough to bring him into the agency, and after decades of work and many volumes Barbey published a first version of it only in 2002 for Éditions de La Martinière, with an introduction by Tahar Ben Jelloun, long out of print. This edition is a return to the original idea. In the sixties Bruno Barbey — who would become a great photographer, among the most representative of Magnum — was only a photography student in Switzerland, trying every way he could to escape the boredom of lessons and come down to Italy, if possible on a motorcycle, to photograph this extraordinary country, exotic and yet very close, full of energy, light and character.