Italy&Italy

Photographs by Pasquale Bove
Curated by Luca Santese
Preface by Giancarlo Dotto

From photojournalist Pasquale Bove’s vast archive, comprising more than 250,000 images, Luca Santese identified 306 shot between 1985 and 2000 as the conceptual cornerstones of Italy&Italy. Following precise editing criteria, Santese’s main goal with Bove’s archive was to create and organically articulate the iconography of those years, starting from a fragment: the everyday and social life of the city of Rimini and its surroundings.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Rimini represented what could be defined as “italian-ness”; in Rimini everyone felt at home, from the prominent politicians who had fun in the many dancing clubs, to the thousands of working-class people who reached this holiday destination from every city of the country.
Bove has photographed and catalogued hundreds of situations and environments that radically differ from each other, free from political or social distinctions. The result is a project that conveys different feelings, moods, memories, joys, and sorrows.