Crossroads

This ancient road was built by consul Marco Emilio Lepido.
Its construction was completed in 187 BC, extending 252 kilometers (77 miles) from Rimini, a stronghold founded in 268 BC, to Piacenza which became a Roman colony in 218 BC.
The Via Emilia, therefore, constitutes the backbone of an urban geographic system, it is a road with a political military function, but also of great public and commercial importance which would lend its name to the VIII Augustan Region.

Its relevance to the cities and areas it crossed has been reflected up to modern times: in fact the state road SS 9 bears the same name.

Nino Migliori must have seemed an unusual wanderer to the eyes of the travellers surprised passing along the via Emilia, and it is that astonishment that is manifested in the incredulous looks of the passers-by. His face half hidden by a photographic device, which lends itself to be deciphered as a system for experimental operations, has allowed him to achieve a sense of disorientation exactly in the familiarity of this historical road.

Like a two-faced Janus he shot scenes simultaneously, obtaining the “photographic capturing” of what was behind his back. He accompanied the choice of subjects to be shot with the casualness of what his camera caught according to a procedure that suggests infinite polarity: free will-chance, conscious-unconscious, human-mechanical.

Here the occurrence of the image seems destined to a disempowering of the author, but, in reality, this series of front-back views confirm Migliori’s profound “humanity”, his desire to subtract the subject from the bonds of photographic technique allowing it to become subject of this art.