My wife and partner in this adventure, Maria Elena, enjoys the pictures I snap of streaming strings of laundry suspended from small balconies or stretching across some alleyway that we sometimes glimpse in our ramblings around Italy. These waving pendants of home-life must have something to do with a shared common bond or maybe some symbol of family and nurturing, I’m not sure. She also enjoys the pictures I take of Italians we meet and even of those we sometimes don’t really meet in a formal sense – that fleeting passerby for example.
If I am inclined to take a picture, I’ll first ask permission. After all, I am up close and personal with no doubt about what I’m trying to do. To this point, by the way, my only refusal was from a nun in Taormina! Oh well, her loss!
There is something magical about a face. Faces tell us things. Some contend a face is a reflection of that person’s inner feelings and mirror their inner emotions. Do our first impressions owe their formation to that smile, that frown or that “Marlboro Man” rugged sort of look? No doubt we form judgements, for good or bad, leading to the assignment of personal traits based on someone’s smile, frown, their mystery, or just general appearance. Does it tell of the life lived (or not lived), a sadness, their spirit and gusto for life or possibly of some hardship? I feel there is a little of all that plus the mystique of the person - sort of like when we say “if only these walls could talk” - in a face. What does that face tell us – what’s in a face?
Italy has many faces (“facce”). Above are some of my faces, the “Facce d’Italia”. Enlarge and Enjoy.
Paolo