ISOLARI

The travel journals of ancient navigators, collected in books called isolari (island books), invited readers to imagine distant places without knowing how to reach them. This fragmented, fascinating prose came alive for readers searching for a sense of connection within those pages.

Daniele Vita’s photographs measure the emotional distance between the viewer and the subjects. Some of these subjects look out beyond the frame, creating a shared space of mutual connection with the reader. Using an ethnographic, documentary approach, Vita uses photography to observe, narrate, and understand the hidden life behind the silence of each image. The rituals of Holy Week, bleak countrysides, solitude, and waiting become the protagonists of photos taken in Sicily, Lampedusa, and other "islands" of daily life.

However, this book contains two isolari. Vita’s realistic photographic narrative overlaps and contrasts with an isolario reimagined by Stefano Jacoviello. Freed from their original projects, the photographs form new connections through visual rhymes, similarities, and counter-shots, clustering together like islands. Each one is accompanied by a short story that translates the visual image into literature.

Jacoviello sees islands as sources of endless stories. He guides us through a fantastical archipelago of eight islands—of lovers, solitudes, horizons, appearances, metamorphoses, Thalassa, sacrifice, and endless waiting. Together, they draw a map of the soul, where every photograph is a brief landing point into a deeper world of meaning. Comprising around ninety images selected from Vita’s work, Jacoviello’s modern isolario reveals the presence of an absence and speaks of distance—a condition that both threatens and protects, serving either as a path to a joyful utopia or to the condemnation of loneliness.