PASSACÖR

In the Mantuan dialect, passacör translates as “afternoon nap”. These photographs serve as visions from an intensely vivid dream, dreamt beneath the sunshine just south of the River Po.

“...[Y]ou must know that it’s the common experience of mankind to have diverse visions during sleep; and albeit the sleeper, while he sleeps, deems all alike most true, but, being awake, judges some of them to be true, others to be probable, and others again to be quite devoid of truth, yet not a few are found to have come to pass…”            

          - Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron

   In the Mantuan dialect, passacör translates as “afternoon nap”. These photographs are intended to serve as visions from an intensely vivid dream, dreamt beneath the hazy sunshine just south of the River Po. Fed by fleeting memories of a rambling road-trip with local friends – which wound its way through the towns and villages and fields and floodplains of their beloved Oltrepò Mantovano – it is now difficult for me to decipher whether they are figments of a real world or one that was imagined. Yet together they reflect a profoundly true experience of a unique and special place that I found to be both meaningful and magical, and quietly hint at the lives, stories, histories, tales and traditions that are deeply embedded within this remarkable region, as well as those which more widely reside within our shared and collective unconscious.