GIOVANNI ZAFFAGNINI

Dream Villas (1993 - 2003)

Seaside huts in the Ravenna coast


Modest wooden cabins built on the sand, eroded by wind and salt, whipped by the bora and caressed by the sirocco. There to undergo the effects of time, there to tell of their double life: places for snoozing and eating watermelon with daytime friends, and bachelor’s quarters for the poor at night […] Simple objects that have nothing to do with the contorted and ramshackle sheet metal of illegal buildings. These images have an emblematic lightness, stealing from Medusa, through the camera mirror a non-petrified vision of the world . It’s the “lightness” that Italo Calvino describes in his Lezioni americane which best approaches the grace of these Ville dei sogni (Dream Villas). A thoughtful and never frivolous lightness.

Vilbres Rabboni

From An ordered and simple way to look at the world, introduction to Ville dei sogni, Ravenna, 2006, Danilo Montanari Editore.