Dream of the Rifle and Shape of the Heart

"Dream of the Rifle and Shape of the Heart'' is the photographic account of an unexpected journey I did very recently back to the house where I was born and which I left at the age of fifteen. This journey took place in the wake of two apparently unrelated events which followed each other by less than a week: the death of my grandmother, Ina, at the age of 98 and Russia's invasion of Ukraine with the subsequent return of the spectre of war in Europe. I have been a news cameraman for an international agency for over 20 years and have developed a sense that big world events - no matter where they break - have to do with my life and affect it directly. I travelled to Afghanistan and Iraq in the early years 2000, I went to cover the aftermath of the tsunami in Indonesia, to Israel and Gaza, to Lebanon and to Tunisia at the start of the Arab spring, in the middle of the Mediterranean at the height of the migration crisis in Europe. So, I had the same feeling when the war in Ukraine started. But, then, something which touched my life much more deeply had also happened. So, instead of catching a plane to Warsaw to travel across the border into Ukraine, I got in my car with my wife Sara and my 8-year old Martino and drove down to Sicily, to the house where I was born. In this week of February my life made an abrupt leap forward, the full sense of which I am still very far from understanding. The two events - so close in time - combined and blended in mysterious ways. In the days immediately following that fateful week I dreamt - or maybe just visualized - myself holding a rifle. I do not know if this is right. I do not know if it is wrong. But I did. Born in Western Europe at a time and in a place where perpetual peace was believed to be an achieved conquest, I had never really thought of war as real a possibility. There were wars, but elsewhere. Here there had been war. Both my grandparents had fought it. But it had been so bad that we thought the lesson had been learnt and all the antidotes were in place. It would be legitimate to ask why to share a story that is very personal and intimate. I asked myself that question and have been in doubt before turning this personal diary into a photographic project. The reason why, eventually, I did can be summed up by the fact that - although the feelings and events portrayed are mine - they touch onto the universal human experience. I find this is always the case when you enter the deep and fundamental events of life: death, birth, fatherhood and war. Which - together with place and identity - are the underlying themes of this essay. I have been a news cameraman all my life, as I said, and I have intruded other people's lives to capture exactly these universals in their experiences. I felt it was now time to treat myself as I have treated them. And tell my own story with the same means. My grandmother, Ina, was born in 1923. For the largest part of her life she has lived in the house by the sea where I was born and grew up. In that house, in February of 2022, she died peacefully in her bed, like a candle that going off in the wind. Up until that moment, she had been a pillar in the life of her numerous descendants and that house had been the centre of her our family life. Even if many of us had left it and lived scattered around the world. Now that house, the one that I visited with my wife and 8-year old son as I took the pictures that make up ''Dream of the Rifle and Shape of the Heart'' , will be no more. When the paperwork will be ready, it will be demolished and the new owners of the land will build a condominium of apartment blocks. As I walked through the large rooms of the house, looking at the furniture, the paintings, the pictures that I had always considered to be there from the beginning of time and for ever, thinking that very soon even the concrete walls would not be there anymore, it was impossible not to think about the destroyed houses and the thorn apart memories I was seeing everyday in the pictures coming from Ukraine. But my thoughts went further. In my twenty years as an agency cameraman, I have traveled a lot. I have seen wars, disasters, earthquakes, riots... But it was always the life of others. I always had that peaceful, stable, ancient house by the sea to come back to. Now, something had changed. Now it was my life. As I watched my grandmother lying in her coffin before it was sealed, as I saw my father - for whom Ina (my mother's mother) had been like a mother having he lost his parents very young - with tears in his eyes for the first time in my life, as I saw my son Martino watching the lush garden from the same dark room and from the same window from which I had done the same so many times at his age...when I felt these these four generations of my breed still in the same room for the last time and at such powerful moment... then, my thoughts went further. I looked at the house, the city, the people - all so familiar - with different eyes. As if for the first time. And I thought of the rifle again. The rifle I pray never to have to hold. But which I see - elsewhere in the world - people not at all different from me are holding... if I would ever have to fight, kill and be killed like they do, I thought, then it would be here. It would be for this sharp land of lava and for this wild, indifferent, stunning sea that shaped my heart. It would be for the primal force of the Etna, the volcano that breathes behind the house and that shaped my heart. It would be for this dark and sensuous city that also shaped my heart. It would be for these people that I love and for the memory of this house where I was born and that has given me the shape of my heart.