Andrea Calestani: El Navili

There are places where the past and the present meet and almost merge into a plot whose charm is hard to resist. The rain wets the car wind shield with small, boring drops, transforming it into a screen on which the images flow in black and white full of an ancient attraction. The photographer's gaze crosses it to linger on a landscape whose geometric rigour he captures: the bridge that defines the horizon has the imposing solemnity of a church facade but the image becomes dynamic in the lower part crossed diagonally as it is by the line of the parapet that runs along the Naviglio. Today the rare passers-by pay a distracted glance to that iron, those tie rods, those bolts. Yet these elements still retain the signs of an ancient civilization where iron represented modernity, the strength that knew how to resist the ravages of time, the challenge to the future, the same audacity that still characterizes the arches of the railway stations. Andrea Calestani approaches the Navigli with the curiosity of someone who has already experienced Milan in distant years but who is now rediscovering it when faced with places he had never visited.

(from the introduction by Roberto Mutti)