Sanità

The Rione Sanità is solitude and love, irony and tragedy, faith and sin. The contrasts generate surreal existences. The street and the house merge together, the private becomes public and the public hides the secrets of the private. Silence is a rare gift for these alleys, but in its revelation you rediscover the naked and immense soul of a forgotten humanity. My project focuses on the Rione’s life in its intimate and sweet fold. The black and white features of a perennially painful humanity come out of the shadow showing intense relationships of love.My images want to give back the best part of that flesh that can also be bestial. The Rione Sanità was built in the 16th century, in a quarry used as a burial place during the Greco-Roman period. The strong link between inhabitants and death is one of the distinctive features of the district. The district, born as a residence place for aristocratic families, has become one of the poorest in Naples due to the construction of the Ponte Sanità (later called Ponte Maddalena Cerasuolo). The bridge, built by the French between 1806 and 1809 and created to connect the Royal Palace of Capodimonte to the rest of the city, has excluded the district from the city’s life. The Rione Sanità is developed in a depression: it is an urban reality in itself, which is not necessary to cross to move from one side of the city to another. This isolation, exacerbated by lack of integration and development policies, has led to the proliferation of various social problems such as unemployment, school drop-outs.At the same time, the district has retained its identity. Among the inhabitants of the Rione Sanità has grown a strong sense of belonging only scratched on the surface by modernity. The district welcomes a vast humanity with different geographical origins and different personal stories. This diversity is a wealth. There is not only marginality, but also an extraordinary vitality.