ITALIANS

<p class=ql-align-center></p><p>At the city's threshold men gather: barber railroader upholsterer electrician butcher. These portraits do not chase the picturesque; they propose a grammar of the ordinary. Each photograph is a sentence that says only this was yet a detail-an unruly crease a shadow too sharp-opens the image to another reading. Names dates places are not clerks of memory but small laws binding encounters to time. The light is shared the distance honest; consent replaces performance. Italy appears less as nation than as syntax: gestures of work tempos of speech the modest pride of being named by what one does. To turn these pages is to learn a slow attention to meet the sovereign dignity of the minor and to find in repetition a quiet event: a small republic of meaning at a gate called Porta Genova. </p>