Pictures of objects photographed during his many travels in Italy and around the world, often of little value but characteristic of the place visited. In over fifty years of work, driven by an unceasing curiosity, Scianna has gathered more than a million photographs. Always careful to keep away from specialisations (fashion photographer, landscapist, portraitist, anthropologist) and showing great versatility, he has portrayed men, women, children, places of sorrow and of joy, but also things, though "not as a still-life specialist", as he likes to point out. The book, like the exhibition it accompanies, offers a double path: the polyphonic tale of a series of characteristic objects "found" over the years is joined by ten chosen "pieces" to which he is particularly attached and which he keeps jealously in his home in Milan, shown here for the first time. "Things tell stories, they tell our story, like photographs," he has written. Like a kind of private diary, the volume brings together a great many things that try to tell the sense, the form and the emotions the world offers and to evoke places and sensations far away in time and space.