Gabriele Rossi says about himself:
“I used to live beside the sea. Since I was 4 years old, I used to go skiing with my family, sliding on the snow and looking at the mountains all around; the pine trees and its wet ground. I particularly remember a year. We reached Dolomiti with no snow. A real delusion.
I was born in Latina (Italy) in 1979. After stopping spending holiday by the mountains, I started studying Humanistic Science and, after two years of being bored, I got myself into photography. My first camera was the one I was taking with me in the mountains. Afterward, I moved to Rome and, then, to Milan to study photography.
That was the right time to come back to my hometown to go deep into all the places from my past, facing the reality. Everything has changed.”
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About ‘Olim Palus’:
Everything started in 1926 when Benito Mussolini array a great drainage of a piece of land in the centre of Italy. Pioneers from north of Italy were called to work in these challenge against nature and malaria, with the promise of a house and ten hectares of land to farm.
Latina was born six years later, by the project of the architect Oriolo Frezzotti, one of the major representative of Rationalist and it quickly gained attention from all over the world. The city today has 120,000 inhabitants and it is surrounded from one side by the mountains and from the other side by the sea.
The photographs are an observatory that wants to describe the short layered life of a young Italian city. A vertical shifting vision, where the city opens out itself taking the shape of a contemporary archeology. This urban build up area that became a city in few years describes us what happened to this hard territory ‘The Palude Pontina’.
A history after all unique and fast, in countertrend with the thousand years old Italian history, but still storing in its shapes the sequence of events: pain, death, glory, identity, and destruction.
