The exhibition and the book arise from the wish to create the first photographic collection within the Contemporary Art Collection of the Vatican Museums. It is the first time a museum has commissioned a production of this kind, inseparably linked to the museum itself, which becomes both its subject and its recipient. The project sets out to build a series of pathways between imagination and memory, documentation and interpretation, composing a body of images that can become an archive of the present for so symbolic a place. Massimo Siragusa, Antonio Biasiucci, Rinko Kawauchi, Francesco Jodice, Martin Parr, Alain Fleischer, Mimmo Jodice, Bill Armstrong and Peter Bialobrzeski were each asked to document it independently and at different moments, starting from a few thematic areas: time, history and memory; space; people; works and fetishes. Thanks to their different styles and unusual points of view, many surprising aspects emerged: the works, the museum spaces, the traces left by the daily flow of visitors, the spectacular architecture set in the fabric of the city, what is visible and what is normally far from the public’s gaze. The book reproduces all the works made for the project and now acquired by the museums, with institutional texts and critical essays by the two curators and by international scholars.