MAREMMA © Carlo Carletti – All Rights Reserved
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BORDERLAND
“When Guido Piovene came to Italy at the end of the 1950s, he was really astonished to see how much had already disappeared in the Maremma: the malarial rivers of the marshes populated by many untypical birds, the spectral appearing of cowboys, the wild herds held off by soft long-haired sheepdogs, which “often live, by contrast, where man is poor”.
Therefore, some of the most celebrated stereotypes of the Maremma were, already in those years, nothing more than amemory.
“The thin long-horn oxen of the Maremma, with their diabolic looking and teasing flesh, had disappeared (…), as well as the horse race of the Maremma with its lightening jerk, which reached by surprise the wild animal. According to the legend, the famous Far West American and Texan horse comes from it(. ..).
The cowboys have almost completely disappeared and the very few survivings have been employed with a monthly pay”. But Piovene continues then to remark, “even the old traditions, the fireplace of the Maremma, the popular songs, the hunting ritual and the meat soups, spiced pieces of lambs and wildboars poured on sliced bread, don’t exist anymore in the valley and they’re not doomed to along life on the hills either”.
Yet all that had already disappeared fifty years ago keeps nowadays alive the literary and pictorial cliche of the Maremma, characterized by the presence of animals and cowboys, looking like the paid actors of an ecologist fiction.
The nearest sea area of the Maremma has been for centuries adifficult and unfriendly land, aplace to avoid, or to use Lawrences’s words “one of the most deserted and wild regions of Italy”.
Now it looks, instead, like abig hotel, for it has been totally planned for accommodation. As anywhere else along the Italian coasts, the deserted beaches have become atourist meeting place, as well as the spreading of villas, residences, camping has taken off the signs of alandscape, built up in their long and desperate struggle for survival.
The Maremma of the ponds and marshes, where all the streams, the ditches and gullies coming down from the hills, slow down until stopping and becoming stagnating mirrors, has been for centuries the theatre of constant works of drainage, hydraulic engineering and fillings.
The result of this process that started with the Grand Ducal Enlightenment and finished with the Reformism of the Christian-Democratic wing of the Maremma government, was aradical change in society, economy and landscape: kilometres of new roads, ahundred of public works, amassive coming of strangers and anew urban planning have deeply transformed the former wild and malarial land into arich countryside.
Behind it, on the top of the hills, the villages which, in order to be far and safe from the unhealthy air of the valley, were built clinging on the even more insidious and dangerous bowels of the mines. It’s another story of effort and pain, which immediately reminds the Niccioleta slaughter in 1944 and the not less terrible one in Ribolla 10 years later.
As everyone sees and knows the Maremma has always been referred to as abitter, cruel and hard land.
Fortunately, this Maremma doesn’t exist anymore, as well as that rural society which preserved, together with its great culture and knowledge, atragic and gloom dimension of archaism and violence. But it’s important to keep the memory of these origins alive, to recognize the several traces in the landscape, without letting them disappear in the new modern post industrial panorama.
It still exists a reality, nor rhetorical or consumed by the stereotype, between the noisy congestion of vans, jeeps and yachtings and the cold breath of people trying to drain a piece of land.
The reading of this world has to be found in a journey through the time and through the historical and social events of an area which is still looking for its balance. Carletti’s pictures show with great accuracy, along with his deep love for this area, what the past events have left here. Among the several meanings he may choose, he prefers highlighting the most secret and reassuring ones, thereby looking for that unsolved feature, for that idea of “borderland”, which represents at last the real ~nd unusual beauty of the Maremma. It seems to read over again Luciano Bianciardi’s
words who, talking about his town, Grosseto, said in a rather protesting tone: “Our town was beautiful even with its genuine feature (…), when its unpaved roads, its spaces open to the wind and to foreigners, made it look like Kansas City”.
These pictures are not only to be looked at, they are rather to be read, in order to discover its deeper meaning, to be lead in a journey to the several meanings of the landscape which is indeed the only way to catch the reality without sliding carelessly on the surface. When I read Carletti’s photos, I remembered Giuseppe Pagano, architect and town planner, director of Casabella between the two wars, as well as leader of the Italian photographic history for the way he witnessed and interpreted the architecture and the landscape in his time. The memory of this architect doesn’t occur to me for asimilarity to Carletti’s photos, as avery big difference may be clearly pointed out between Pagano’s Bauhaus style and Carletti’s realism, but for their common lively curiosity to discover what is apparently minor and ignored, just because it’s under everyone’s eyes.
In the Thirties the official image of Italy was preserved in Alinari, Brogi and Anderson’s archive and afew other ones. Therefore, when Pagano asked the Local Boards about areportage of the Italian farm house, he was said there was nothing else interesting to photograph, except for the material recorded in those archives.
We may still give the same answer today, considering the several reportages over the years on Tuscany and on some areas in particular. To anyone asking again to reduce to aphotogram the Orcia Valley, the Crete Senesi, or just the Maremma, it could be objected that everything has already be said and done and nothing else has to be added.
But as Pagano’s researches clearly show, there’s still an unexplored and secret world, which has to be told in avery simple language, thus contrasting alandscape picture which advertising and tourism are increasingly leaning toward aestheticism.
Carletti’s story runs under our eyes an area abandoned either by men or by animals, but still preserving the traces of an ancient way to work and to live.
The totem of the wind pump and the water depot marks the rhythm of acountryside looking like adesoleted Far West, where awild and stubborn nature takes back its control over the area.
Leaning to the infinite, the horizon reaveals the presence of the sea thanks to the light concentrated on the background of the photogram, open to the quadrangular framing.
The trees of the picture are not just the background of the landscape, as they used to be in the photographic aestheticism, but they rather represent the flOWing time and the substitutes of the missing human being.
The ancient herd fences, the animal branding rite and the pasture fields, have now been completely replaced by the more profitable and reassuring riding and polo grounds.
Long stretches of the “Aurelia” road, which was once wonderfully surrounded by nature and thereby one of the most favourite place to read the landscape of the Maremma, have now become graveyards of cement, featured by new unpleasant roads with guard rails and road’s men houses.
The several pictures taken by Carletti from 1998 to 2001 show his vivid interest to explore that border line where the change hasn’t still been defined and all that was once, doesn’t exist anymore.
Some walls, border fences and some decaying and impenetrable houses show an epochal change and astill unfulfilled destiny.
The photographic interpretation of reality is not limited to the place and time of clicking, but it also includes the printing process in the dark room, the choice of the grey-scale, the combination of dark and light and the tone degree to mark the atmosphere and the picture itself.
In Carletti’s work these expressive stages play an essential part and that’s why his work must be considered the final result of acomplex process where knowledge, poetry and technique are closely combined.
One of the greatest photographer of the history, Edward Weston, wrote once to the important landscape photographer, Ansel Adams, about the means of expression they both used to communicate:
“A picture is not what we see with our eyes. Our binocular vision is acontinuous flowing, while the camera catches and fixes asingle, isolated moment (if the damned printing doesn’t fade!).
Besides, to modify the picture we make use of different focal lens, as well as we correct the colour “too much”.
When we print then, we use high contrast paper, continuing thereby intentionally our distortion of reality, as setting and object have not their real feature. Altough this is alegitimate process to work, we must admit that this is not just seeing, for we use reason and creative imagination”.
The photographer is, thereby, not just asimple witness of reality, indeed he creates the picture, catching asingle moment out of life and interpreting it according to his point of view, education and senSibility.
He does much more than communicating news and contents, as he provides apicture which is not just adocument, but acomplex and creative work of art.
Consequently, the picture comes to be part of an explorator’s endless tale, where climate, light and the photographer’s personal experience may always change.
Some pictures, where Carletti tells about acertain sidereal light and the wind shakes clothes and palms, are not just atravel report, but the evocative signs of some memory flashes and suggestions.”
Carlo Nepi
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