The air of the times is the air we breathe every day and observe around us, but it is also the air Massimo Sestini captures in a series of astonishing aerial views of Italy. From a helicopter or a plane, over years of work, he has built a long, precise and passionate itinerary, catching natural beauty, dramas, political events, tragedies and moments of leisure. With an unusual zenithal view he overturns our visual perceptions: he makes the stranded Concordia sail, turns sky and earth upside down chasing a Eurofighter, dares with animated shadows. A news story (the migrants’ boat seen from the sky, a picture that won many prizes including the World Press Photo), a habit (the August holiday on the beach), a natural catastrophe (the L’Aquila earthquake), political and cultural events (from the Capaci massacre to the Pope’s funeral): in his images Italy reveals its beauty, its fragility and its great complexity. The volume gathers a thorough selection of the events that marked the country’s cultural, political and social history over the last quarter of a century, all of them seen from above.