The ideal field of Merisio’s poetics is the peasant world, with its traditions and deep religiosity, and "minor" Italy, its people, its historic centres, the beauty of its nature. With his camera he accomplished a mission no one else in Italy could or would: to be the witness, and the bard, of a civilisation, the peasant one, that vanished between the 1950s and 1960s. From the start his lens aimed straight at the humanity of simple people, catching love, work, friendship, play, waiting, joy, prayer: a song of earth and sky, life and death, the beauty of memory offered in the purity of forms and the essentiality of black and white. The pictures range from over sixty years ago to the present, and even the oldest are contemporary because alive, not documents or archive. Organised in six sections, Il canto della terra, Le età della vita, Il lavoro dell’uomo, I volti dell’abitare, I nostri ieri, Janua Coeli, the book retraces his whole work. His 1963 reportage In morte dello zio Angelo in the Zurich magazine Du, praised by Henri Cartier-Bresson, brought him international recognition. "The last of the humanists."