Italy: Puglia from above, and Etna working

Fourteen prints, and Italy is the only collection here where roughly half the photographs have a person in them. That was not a plan. It is what the place does.

Puglia from directly above

Alberobello's trulli are conical dry-stone roofs, and at street level they are charming and slightly impossible to photograph — you get a wall, a doorway, one cone at an angle.

I Tetti dei Trulli is the view that makes sense of them: high and oblique at the end of the day, where hundreds of cones catch the low sun at slightly different angles and the whole town turns into one field of stone. It stops being a village and becomes a pattern. La Vespa e i Trulli is the ground-level counterpoint, and the two work well as a pair on a wall.

On the coast, Ombrelloni Blu in Puglia is the print people stop on most. Blue umbrellas on a small cove, shot from overhead so the umbrellas read as dots on turquoise. La Cala Segreta at Cala dell'Acquaviva is the same coast at the height of summer — a cove with limestone walls, water that needs no help, and every umbrella in the province on the sand at the top of it.

Polignano, which is a cliff with a town on it

La Città sulla Scogliera is the wide view: houses built right to the edge of a limestone cliff, with nothing between the last window and the sea.

Nuotatori a Polignano is the one I would choose. Swimmers in the cove below the town, small against the rock, photographed from high enough that the scale does the work. And Il Tuffo — the backflip, the only black-and-white print in the catalogue. Monochrome because the colour was doing nothing for it and the shape was doing everything.

Etna

Sicily is the outlier. Two of the three Etna photographs are not beautiful in the way the coastal work is beautiful, and that is the point.

I Crateri dell'Etna is the volcano working — steam off the craters, black ground. Il Vulcano e la Foresta puts the forest back in and shows you the line where one stops and the other starts. Fiori sulla Terra Vulcanica is the third act: wildflowers in volcanic soil, which is the whole story of the mountain in one frame.

Rome, twice, both times sideways

Rome is the most photographed city in Europe and there is no point adding another straight record of it.

Il Colosseo tra i Fiori shoots the Colosseum through foreground flowers, so the building is soft and the flowers are sharp — deliberately the wrong way round. L'Altare della Patria goes the opposite way: white marble, hard light, treated as pure geometry.

The two with a scooter in them

La Lambretta in Piazza and Niente è Impossibile are in the catalogue because people keep buying prints like them and I understand why. They are not documents of anywhere in particular. They are the feeling of the country, which is a legitimate thing for a photograph to be as long as nobody pretends otherwise.

All fourteen are in the Italy collection. If you are weighing framed against unframed, here is what the box frame actually is.