Reggio Emilia

Reggio Emilia, 13th September 2026

Reggio Emilia is a city that has long defined itself by how well it holds together. Its civic life, its cooperatives and its welfare tradition are part of the story it tells about itself, and that story is largely true.

The photographs were made in a single day, September 13, 2026.

Nothing here demands to be noticed. The city runs on small agreements: what is shared, what is kept closed, who is allowed to stay. They are rarely spoken. They sit in the quiet between one gesture and the next.

Conflict does not need a square to exist. In a place like this it lives in the gap between the order a community describes and the one it actually lives, and in the people who remain inside that order while part of them is already somewhere else.

The photographs follow that gap and stay long enough to notice it.

Two-storey ochre corner building with dark shutters, barred ground-floor windows and chimney pots, partly in tree shadow, with a radio mast above the roof and street signs below.

The silhouette of a person walking through a dark portico, framed by an arched patch of sunlight on a pale wall beside a wooden door.

A man on a bicycle, blurred by motion, passes a doorway and a roll-down metal shutter covered in graffiti, in hard sunlight and shadow.

Two open windows with wooden shutters on a plain façade, one with torn curtains hanging in the dark opening, divided by a vertical drainpipe.

Four men stand close together in a park, heads lowered toward something held in hand, one with a cigarette in his mouth and a bicycle behind them.

A smiling man crouches beside a cardboard box with dominoes laid in a loop while another man holds a tile, with a bottle, a water bottle and bicycles nearby.

A black cat, mostly in darkness, looks out through a grid of wire mesh with its eyes catching the light.

Rusty vertical metal bars wrapped in dried vines, with bright blurred foliage and a pale wall behind them.

Looking up a narrow street at yellow and ochre façades with wooden shutters and overhead cables, with a green copper dome rising against a clear blue sky.

Stacks of woven café chairs and a folded table pushed against a pink wall beside a barred window and a folding gate, in an empty alley.

Hands reach over a cardboard box where dominoes form a winding line, with scores written across the cardboard and gravel on the ground below.

A ginger cat lies behind a wire mesh on a ledge, looking toward the camera, with a teal shutter behind it.

A rusted billboard holding a peeling poster of a woman in a pink 1950s-style dress surrounded by irons and laundry, with the words “Salva il tuo matrimonio” and “8 marzo 2026, Giornata internazionale delle donne”.

A row of arches along a portico, with curved patches of sunlight on the wall surrounded by deep shadow, a wooden door and small barred windows receding into the distance.

A wall of peeling ochre plaster with two barred ground-floor windows and louvred shutters above, crossed by the diagonal shadow of an ornate ironwork balcony.

Three men gather around a cardboard box in a park, playing dominoes. One leans over it with a pen in hand while another reaches across the tiles.

A man holds a handful of dominoes beside a cardboard box covered in handwritten scores, with a beer bottle and a child’s pencil case on the bench.

A municipal sign reading “Zona sottoposta a controllo di comunità, Neighbourhood Watch”, with a row of stylised eyes, above a one-way arrow sign covered in stickers and graffiti.

A white van parked in the shade of a covered area behind a green chain-link fence, in front of a weathered residential building with closed shutters.