Simone Donati
Exhibition
2025
Simone Donati
Exhibition
2025
Vall’Olmo, January 2025
“Su nella valle” (“Up in the valley”) is the second chapter of the long-term work that Simone Donati is carrying out in the Casentino area. After exploring the urban areas of Bibbiena, Poppi, and Pratovecchio Stia, with a slow and attentive gaze turned to marginal and little-visited places, Donati now shifts his focus to the upper valley: mountain areas, small villages, and remote hamlets, where silent everyday life reveals deep roots, quiet resistance, and stories far from postcard clichés.
The work, commissioned by the Festival della Fotografia Italiana, tell the story of these places and the community of people who live there: lumberjacks who work the woods with skill and precise gestures, farmers who live their relationship with animals with passion and effort, families who pass down traditions and knowledge, elderly custodians of memory and young people who choose to stay or return, opposing the slow emptying of the internal areas. There is no shortage of small shops, true strongholds of sociality and identity, which tenaciously resist the standardization of the present. The photographic process was, this time too, slow and exploratory: an immersive practice, attentive to the details and nuances of the territory. The spectacular image was not sought, but rather a form of visual listening, capable of restoring the sense of everyday life, of the habits and simple gestures that make up mountain life. A work that aims to be a testimony, but also a reflection on the value of the small communities and human landscapes that inhabit the depths of Italy.
Su nella valle on display at Galleria Mariæ Nivis, Pratovecchio, June 14th – September 21st, 2025