HIDDEN FOREST

“Hidden Forest” is the story of a place that can be near as well as far away. You can travel a lot looking for it. But you can also find it very near. This forest is our intimate world. The forest is mysterious and dark: strange whispers, rustles of leaves, footprint in the snow, animal sounds, spirits following you. There is something magic in it. You can be a little scared, or you can explore it and learn to know it - and, of course, to know yourself. The last caption is ispired by the famous verse “and thence we came forth to see again the stars”, from The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. Images depict Appennini Range, Emilia-Romagna, Italy. Nowadays snow in winter time is becoming just a memory, while once it was normal. “Hidden forest” is one of the stories from the main project “Stories From Planet Earth”. On one side, it's a lyric dedicated to the beauty of the world and to travelling, losing and finding ourselves in the embrace of the wild, mainly in the North. On the other side, it's a testament to the environment, that, due to several factors, is rapidly modifying its peculiar characteristics. Travelling can of course be a general metaphor of managing changes, that nowadays are occuring in the world at multiple levels: ecology, society, health, safety, history, economy, up to our psychological and personal level. The whole project starts from landscape and travel photography, but it moves to a more intimate dimension of visual storytelling in which images, words, emotions, are all in one, in order to generate both rational thoughts and little poetical suggestions in everyone of us. We live our existence among transitions bigger than us. And we can look, think, act with respect, responsability and awareness of ourselves and our world.