Marco Paoli travelled through Tuscany as if it were the last strange and wild land to discover. The pictures of Hallelujah Toscana tell a different, magical and mysterious region, in any case a land never seen before. The charm that those places can take on whom who look at them is increased by the choice of black and white and by the relationship between the author and the texts that contribute to the visual storytelling as a sort of choral counter melody.
The poems by Alba Donati, president of the Scientific and Literary Cabinet G.P. Vieusseux, become actual descents into the heart and history of gardens, of houses, of open or enclosed spaces, while the telling of the Pulitzer Prize Michael Cunningham, that fits in as a third voice, immerse us in a set of different places, romantic or painful, left to their own or treated as by heavenly gardeners, fascinating or simply alive, from time to time crossed by history, by the chronicle of joys or sufferings, by art, by the flow of time, or by the immobility.
In Hallelujah Toscana we can find everything – from the villas of Lucca to the quarries of Carrara, from the Fairies’ Spring in Poggibonsi to the Padule of Fucecchio, from Pianosa prison in the Orrido di Botri to the catacombs of Santa Mustiola in Chiusi – everything as it was under the beam of light of the first day of creation or the first day after the end of the world.
