photography
noon, January 4, 2022 – 5:44 pm
One hundred color photos published by Intra Moenia with texts by Attilio Wanderling
from Natasha Festa
it was Sergio Siano’s gaze to investigate the silence of the sirens, to patrol the coast of Naples from the sea and the sky. The photographer born in the Spanish Quarters, who has a substantial bibliography to his credit, leaves the Caravaggesque light on which he worked on the mainland with an explicit declaration of love – his volume With the eyes of Caravaggio signed with Francesco de Core – and plunges into the blinding beauty of the coastline. Siano rests the lens where the city ends, on the tuff cornice of the pizza-Naples, and X-rays it along the perimeter, following lines and curves, sinks and views, caves and islets, promontories and bays. All of this Naples seen from the Sirens, just published by Intra Moenia (160 pages, 100 photos, 29 euros) with texts by Attilio Wanderling and famous writers. The title therefore suggests the sinuous posture of this endogenous traveler who blends Grand Tour amazement and visceral belonging to the places he narrates.
It starts from Nisida and Bagnoli, the former island, linked to the earth by a pier only in 1936. And this offers a key to the whole elegant photographic volume that portrays the perennial duel between nature and human gesture, between creation and recreated that only in rare places, as in the spectacular embrace of Porto Paone failed to arrive. With the transition from the materiality of the lava stone, the paving stones and the piperni of the alleys of the historic center, which has always been the subject of investigation, to the fluidity of the amniotic sea material, Siano betrays Caravaggio with Gemito by adopting the enchantment of these on the bodies of the fishermen. From the Bay of Trentaremi to Posillipo where, to put it with a caption by Domenico Rea, Naples finds the measure of his time, of the seasons and, what is more important, the measure of man.
The photographer penetrates the gruyere of caves, capturing the mutability of the light, returning the lapping of small and large waves such as those in the Grotta del Tuono, so called for its barrel vault that amplifies the sound of the water until it sounds like a thunderous thunder. The pages depicting the ancient Roman villa of Pausilypon exhale salt. The landings hidden in the houses stranded like ships on the rocks – Riva Fiorita, Peirce with its ramparts, Martinelli who also offers the cover image – are as beautiful as the revelation of a secret and the descents to the sea of Villa La Pagoda portrayed as catabasis heavenly.
At the Lungomare, then, nature also becomes human with summer tables at the Broken Column, dives and umbrellas. Finally, the fishing that resists between the villages of Santa Lucia and Marechiaro with the nets curled up on themselves like big cats in the sun. The port with the cruise ships, the abandoned factories, the dock, the ancient ships of Naples and what little advanced beaches do the rest. That indeed the whole.
January 4, 2022 | 17:44
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