WINTER MIST

When a snowstorm imposes us to stop and, in our temporary forced inactivity, to finally take the time to observe nature and the environment in which we happen to live, invariably we feel astonished in front of the landscape beauty, watching it as if for the first time. In these occasions, the sensitive eye of the photographer makes the difference in helping us to focus our attention on glimpses and views of poignant poetry. The hills of Piacenza, a few kilometers from Milan, Turin and Genoa, are transformed into a dreamlike and timeless place, a land of the mind: muffled landscapes shrouded in white and surrounded in a suspended dimension. The boundary between the earth and the sky is so tenuous as to be almost indistinguishable. The slender profiles of the few elements that emerge from the delicate embrace of the snow design an elegant embroidery made of grass, of bare branches, of streams of water that run through the immaculate lawns. The delicate graphic sign of these "shadows" emerging from the snow, like ghosts wandering in a foggy limbo, recalls the twilight atmosphere of Federica Galli’s beautiful engravings - a great Milanese artist, who recently passed away (1932-2009). By looking at these winter mists, we let ourselves be carried in the dimension of mystical silence and stillness typical of a sacred place: a very precious kind of feeling, because very rare nowadays, not to say almost extinct, from the noisy and excited everyday urban life of our contemporary life.