Ciao Daniele, tell us your story and how you ended up in Sicily.   

I never took a single photo until the first year of university. A friend bought a used film camera, I became curious about it and so I bought one too. Then another friend who studied at the Academy of Fine Arts was working in the dark room and asked me if I wanted to join him one day. That was the moment I decided I loved photography. I started as a self-taught photograph and only shot in film (there was no digital back then..), which was already expensive at the time, and so I also learned to do most of the processing myself. I was still in university back then and doing the most disparate jobs – I would wait tables, pick olives, etc. – to be financially independent. I started photographing student and political rallies and sent them to local papers and magazines, although the first real paid job in photography happened when I got the opportunity to document the plays of a director who was working with inmates at the Re Bibbia prison in Rome. I struggled with magazines and papers, they were hardly ever published, and that made me frustrated, made me second guess whether I was good enough for it. Until I realized that the world of photography was starting to change back then in the early 2000s. When I started, there was a more direct relationship with the magazine, paper etc.: you would physically carry your photos to the office of the photo editor to show in person, and if you were lucky, you would come back with 1 or 2 photos sold. But most of the time nothing. Then the big agencies came along, and they changed the dynamic of the industry: if I tried to send some work to a magazine these days, they would never respond, as if it was unprofessional not to work through an agency. Back then, Italy was also a country where the culture of photography was not as much developed as today, which means that many times the photo editors didn’t even have a background in photography. Then Instagram amplified all this, and we are where we are now, it’s the wild west; the photographic medium, the technique, the aspect of storytelling have all been diluted. 

That’s very interesting. How did you wind up in Sicily then and what attracted you to the Holy Week?

My father is from Sicily, although I was born and raised in Vetralla, outside of Rome. I never really travelled to Sicily growing up, except for a few times, but I always felt there was something missing in me that I needed to find there. In 2010, I went to Trapani and explored the Holy Week, searching for my Sicilian identity. I went back there in the following years and started to explore other towns and cities. In 2017, I decided to move to Catania which made it easier for me to substantiate this body of work and explore the less traveled places. One year I went to Collesano, close to Palermo, where a very ancient rite called ‘A Cerca takes place during the holy week. I slept in the car in front of a church where the procession was supposed to start the morning after. One man arrived early in the morning to open the church and I asked him for some information as he was dressing himself. He happened to be the Jesus in the procession!

Although I must say that what attracts me to these places, people and rites is not the photo per se, but rather the relationships I build. For examples, whenever I go to Trapani I always photograph the same group of people [or ‘vara’ in Italian]. When you are able to build that human connection, the photo always comes as a consequence. Or this one time in Prizzi, where I followed a specific group of devils in disguise who would go from door to door during the procession; by 10AM I had already drunk a half bottle of whisky and was invited to lunch with the family of the man dressed as Death. Or this year in Collesano, when a hooded person asked me to take a photo of him and another man, and then explained that they were father and son. Until I realized later that I had already taken their photo in 2018. I will bring it to them next time. These little anecdotes are at the core of my work and why I photograph in these places.

How do you manage to get the most out of the Holy Week? After all the main day is on Friday and you can only be in one place at one time..

During the years I’ve learned to shy away from the bigger, more famous ones (such as the one in Enna for example). Once I find my group of people within a specific procession, I like to stick with them as it allows me to create a microcosm of relationships that I cannot possibly create if I were to go from place to place every year. Building these relationships is vital especially as Holy Week in Sicily becomes more and more trendy: take Collesano for example; until a few years ago there were probably one or two photographers, this year they had a photo contest! When this happens, you start to see the same photos over and over again. And that’s when the personal connection comes into play, to make a photo really stand out.

If I think about the Holy Week or other religious festivals in Italy and especially in the south, I think they will inevitably disappear. I mean, I don't see kids that spend most of their time on TikTok wanting to carry the cross with the same genuine passion of their fathers and grandfathers…

I think it’s more complex than that. I personally try to create timeless photos, and of course it’s becoming more and more difficult. However, while it is true that most teenagers are attracted more to social media than religious rites, I also perceive that there is still a very important community sentiment in these places, that goes beyond the religious aspect of it. 

A few days ago, I was in Chiaramonte Gulfi to photograph the procession of this Madonna that is carried from a sanctuary to the town along a very steep path. The whole town was there, and you could feel the sense of belonging that those people had as they screamed “viva la Madonna!”; this makes me think that as long as the community is there, this will survive, and this is something beyond religion. The priest was a priest during the mass, but as they carried the statue to the town, he simply became part of the community. The same goes for the young kids who rushed back to get another statue of another saint and bring it to town: that sense of belonging goes beyond the religious aspect and has to do more with the continuation of the community. These are the same kids that will carry the Madonna when they become adults.

In an earlier conversation, you said that you wouldn’t recommend this job to anyone. Why is that?

Because it’s a super difficult job to this day, to live with photography. It’s almost impossible. That’s why teaching and doing workshops is a vital aspect of this job. I teach at a school in Catania, which is a lot of fun. I usually do a week-long workshop in Sicily over the Holy Week but also a three-day one in the Maremma region in Tuscany.

INTERVIEW FROM TWO ITALIAN RASCALS MAGAZINE - ISSUE 2 - ITALIANA