1. The Field Identikit: Forget your name and your publications. If you had to describe your attitude, your way of immersing yourself in a reality to be documented, or reacting to the unexpected solely through three elements of your daily chaos, who are you?

I am a backpack that is always ready, a worn-out volunteer card, and a pair of dirty shoes. The backpack is my way of being in the world: ready to leave, even when I do not know where the day will take me. It could be a hospital ward, the edge of a fire, a runway, a border, a stolen dawn between one job and another. Inside are the cameras, of course, but above all, a choice: to enter stories on tiptoe, without asking reality to make itself beautiful, without demanding that pain, fatigue, or hope strike a pose. The volunteer card, worn down by time and hands, reminds me of where I come from and what comes before any image. Before taking a photograph, I must understand: where I am, who is in front of me, how close I can get, and when to stop. There are moments when the camera is not the most important thing. I have documented fear, the exhaustion of healthcare workers, the silent weight of those going through an emergency. But I learned that, sometimes, the right gesture is to lower the lens, stay close, say a word, offer a presence. In those moments, you are not just a photographer: you are someone who must know how to inhabit the limit, with respect. The dirty shoes tell the rest of the story. They tell that the unexpected is never truly observed from a distance. You have to walk through it, feel it on your skin, accept the dust, the mud, the sirens, the waiting, the sleepless nights, the silences that come after the noise. That is where my photography is born: not from the need to bring order to chaos, but from the attempt to listen to it without betraying it. I look for truth, but not an aggressive truth. I look for it with tact, with modesty, knowing that every face I meet carries something that does not entirely belong to me. I do not photograph to take, but to safeguard. Not to construct easy images, but to leave honest traces. I hope that, years from now, looking at one of my photographs, someone can still feel that all of this really happened. That those hands worked, those faces resisted, those eyes felt fear and courage at the same time. That inside the emergency, even when everything seemed to break, there was still something profoundly human
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2. Framing in the Mud: Tell me about a social context or a situation that is absolutely invisible or squalid to the masses, but where your eye sees the news, a powerful composition, and a story that must be told to reveal the tallest shadow.

The context I would choose is a hospital ward at night, when the city outside turns off and seems to forget everything that continues to happen inside. For many, it would be a place to avoid. The cold neon lights, the persistent smell of disinfectant, the masks, the gloves, the sweat, the held-back fear. Fragile bodies, slow breaths, heavy silences. It is not a beautiful place, nor a comfortable one. It is not a scene one wishes to look back on. It is one of those places that society prefers to remove: illness, old age, loneliness, dependence on others, the most vulnerable part of the human being. Yet, that is exactly where I see the news. Not in the shouted tragedy, not in the sensational event, but in the small gestures. In a hand adjusting an IV line with delicacy. In a nurse with tired eyes, almost emptied, who remains present anyway. In a patient looking into the eyes of a stranger for the face of a son, a daughter, a grandchild who cannot enter. In that silent need to be seen, even when the body is weak and the voice can no longer ask. Photography, in a place like this, should not look for pain. It should look for what resists inside the pain. A light in the dark. A reflection on a visor. A back bent by fatigue. Two hands holding fear and dignity together for an instant. For me, mud is not only the visible mud of emergencies, fires, destroyed roads, or battlefields. There is also an invisible mud, made of endless shifts, sleepless nights, tired bodies, departments that continue to function while outside the world waits for everything to pass. It is a less spectacular fatigue, but deeply profound. A fatigue that rarely makes noise, and precisely for this reason risks not being remembered. Telling a story like this requires respect. You must approach without stealing, look without violating, photograph without turning suffering into a show. I would not look for the easy tear, nor the most dramatic image. I would look for the truth: the one found in faces, in details, in the gestures that nobody notices and that instead hold everything together. A story like this must be told because, years from now, we risk remembering only numbers, bulletins, restrictions, statistics. I, instead, want the faces to remain. The memory of who cured, who resisted, who was afraid, who felt alone. I want the humanity of those closed rooms to remain, where even in the most fragile moment, someone kept looking for family, presence, warmth. And perhaps it is precisely there, in that silent darkness, that a photograph can become necessary.

3. The Bill in the Dark: What is the shadow that hides behind your visual talent? Living with the raw reality of reportage and documenting those who suffer has a price to pay when the camera is turned off. What is yours?

When I photograph a harsh scene, I try to stay in my place: not to get in the way, not to spectacularize, not to take away dignity. The camera serves to witness, but it is not a shield. It lets you enter, it offers you a technical distance, but then that distance ends. The price comes later, when I return home and there is no longer the noise of the ward, the siren, the water bomber, the radio. The eyes remain. The hands remain. The people remain who, perhaps for a few minutes, saw me not as a photographer, but as a son, a grandson, a human presence. In those moments, I have also lowered the camera. Because in front of certain patients you cannot think only about the framing: you have to know how to take a hand. My biggest shadow is this: carrying with me a part of the stories I photographed. Not just death or fear, but also loneliness, the desire for family, the fatigue of those who care, the dignity of those who resist. Photography asks you to look when many would prefer to forget. But then that looking does not turn off together with the camera. If there is a visual talent, behind it there is also a condemnation: remembering too well. The light of five in the morning on a tired nurse, the silence of an intensive care unit, the weight of every image as a responsibility. The bill I pay is no longer being able to say “I did not know”. After certain jobs, reality does not go back to being neutral. It changes the way you see things. But I do not consider it only a burden. It is also the reason why I keep going. Because if those images remain, if one day someone looks at them and understands what really happened, then that bill was not paid in vain.

4. The Declaration of War: If your photography were not guided by ethics or witnessing, but by a deep vengeance or a visceral resentment, against which systemic hypocrisy or piece of the world would you wage war through your lens?

I would wage war against the hypocrisy of time-limited gratitude. Against that piece of the world that applauds doctors, nurses, volunteers, rescuers, firefighters, emergency workers, but then leaves them alone when the siren stops and the news is no longer marketable. It bothers me how the system transforms pain into rhetoric: the hero for a week, the banner, the post, the emotional quote. Then what remains are the grueling shifts, the full wards, the families forced to stay far away, the patients looking for a hand, the volunteers entering the smoke, the people working in fear while outside everyone just wants to go back to forgetting. If we remove ethics and testimony, my photography would become a form of accusation. Not against individuals, but against collective erasure. Against the habit of looking only at the clean image of the emergency and never at the back of it: the dark circles under the eyes, the sweat under the uniform, the bureaucracy, the silence after the trauma, the loneliness of those who care and those who are cared for. I would photograph what the system tries to make digestible. Not the heroism for a poster, but the human price. Not the uniform as a symbol, but the person inside the uniform. Not the sick person as a number, but the face. Not the disaster as a spectacle, but the invisible work that prevents the disaster from becoming definitive. My war would be against this hypocrisy: wanting salvation without looking at who makes it possible. Using big words like care, community, emergency, memory and then emptying them when they are no longer useful. I would aim the lens right there, at the point where society gets emotional but does not change.

5. The Obsession of the Narrative: Every great reporter has an unhealthy mania while developing a long-term story. What is that visual detail, that constant, or that fixed thought that haunts and consumes you until the project is closed?

My obsession is to find the exact moment when a story stops belonging to breaking news and begins to become memory. When I work long term on a project, it is almost never the strongest image that stays with me. It is not the harshest one, the most obvious one, the one that strikes immediately or seems to work at first glance. What chases me is almost always a fragile, silent detail. A gaze that does not look for the camera. A hand left suspended. An imperfect light, maybe at five in the morning, when fatigue can no longer be hidden and every gesture loses its defense. In reportage, it is not enough for me to prove that something happened. For that, numbers, press releases, bulletins, and reconstructions exist. I look for another truth, harder to grasp: the point where a person, even for a single instant, manages to tell more than the context surrounding them. The eyes of an exhausted nurse while continuing to take care of a patient. A visor fogged up by breath. A hand looking for another hand. A daily gesture inside a reality that should not be daily. That is where, for me, photography truly begins to speak. My mania, perhaps an unhealthy one, is that until I encounter that image, I cannot close a story. I can have thousands of shots, strong scenes, important moments, necessary photographs. But if that detail capable of holding dignity, fatigue, and humanity together is missing, I feel I have not yet found the heart of the work. As if I had documented everything, but not told the truth. And then there is another obsession, even deeper: not to betray those I photographed. Not to transform pain into form. Not to use suffering as an emotional shortcut. A photograph can stay with you, of course. It must do so, perhaps. But it must never take anything away from the person it portrays. It must not appropriate their vulnerability. It must not ask pain to become beautiful. Perhaps my fixed thought is all right here: looking for an image that, five or ten years from now, does not make those who look at it say “what a beautiful photograph”, but “now I understand”. Until this happens, for me, the story is not finished. It is still open. It still breathes. It still asks me to stay. Look at the fact that after the book Luce nel Buio, which covers 13 months of the Pandemic, I pushed myself until the end of the emergency, meaning I went from February 5, 2020, with the appointment in the crisis unit and DPC protocol, up to January 28, 2022.

6. The Ghost in the Frame: Is there a reportage or a situation that you were never able to bring home? One that you lost out of fear, due to an ethical block, or because you rightly preferred to intervene and help instead of raising the camera?

Yes, there are images that I did not bring home. And perhaps they are precisely the ones that, more than any others, stayed with me. I do not live them as missed opportunities. I do not consider them mistakes. I consider them boundaries. The exact point where you understand that a camera can tell a lot, get close to pain, cross history, but it can never replace a human presence. It happened to me in Ukraine, in 2022, under the requests of the military, inside a reality where every gesture had a weight and every choice could seem insufficient. There were moments when the scene was in front of me, clear, powerful, necessary. But not everything that happens before your eyes must become an image. Sometimes you have to understand when to stop. When to lower the lens. When respect matters more than the shot. I think of a little girl met at the border, fleeing the war, with a little dog squeezed in her arms. I knelt down next to her. I tried to talk to her. Then I lowered the camera. In that moment, it was not needed. There was no composition to look for, nor a photograph to tear away from pain. There was only a little girl in front of me. And I, there, felt useless. Helpless. Small. As a photographer, as a volunteer, as a human being. It is in moments like this that you truly understand what helplessness is: not as a word, but as a weight in your body. It also happened to me in 2023, during the emergency in Romagna. There, the boundary was different, more physical, more brutal. There was a choice to make between shooting or being overwhelmed by mud. Between staying behind the frame or putting down the camera and helping. Because the mud does not wait. It enters houses, clothes, lungs, memories. And in front of certain scenes, photography is no longer enough: either you are present, or you are just someone watching. So I put down the camera. And I chose to be there. The reportage you do not bring home is not always the one you lose out of fear. Sometimes it is the one you choose not to do because you understood that that image would have been less important than the gesture. My ghost in the frame is this: knowing that not everything I see belongs to me. That not every pain can become photography. That there are scenes to be told and others in front of which you must simply remain human. And if that choice does not produce a photo, so be it. Perhaps it produces respect. And perhaps, in certain cases, it is the cleanest testimony you can leave.

7. The Fracture of the Gaze: Is there a reportage that ended badly, a memorable mistake, or a trauma experienced in the field that you consider the true, fottuta interior fracture from which the reporter you are today was born?

The fracture was not a wrong photograph. It was understanding that a photograph, sometimes, is completely useless. At the beginning, you think that doing reportage means entering where it hurts, staying on your feet long enough, and coming out with true images. You think it is enough to look closely for the truth to enter the frame. Then you discover that it does not enter. The truth overflows. It surpasses you. It puts you in front of a simple and ferocious question: do I shoot, or do I remain human? During Covid, I saw empty eyes, unmoving hands, tired bodies. Wards where suffering was not a theme, but a physical thing. It was in the air, in the broken breaths, in the silences, in the waiting. I photographed a lot. But the fracture came when I had to lower the camera. Some patients spoke to me the way one speaks to a son, a grandson, someone in the family. In those moments, I was no longer a photographer. And if a person asks you for a hand, a word, a presence, continuing to shoot becomes a form of betrayal. Perhaps this wound comes from further away. I lost my father after what I carry inside as an error of judgment. A choice, a passage, an instant that changed everything and left him for over four months in a vegetative state. From that moment on, fragility stopped being something to observe. It became flesh. Family. Guilt. Memory. When you have seen a person you love remain suspended between presence and absence, you no longer look at the pain of others the same way. You can no longer fake distance. You can no longer use it as material. You approach with tact, with fear, with respect. Then there was the border. Ukraine, Romania, cold, children, mothers, men turning back to fight. In front of a twelve-year-old girl with a little dog in her arms, I knelt down. I tried to talk to her. I lowered the camera. It was not needed. I tried to make her laugh. I did not succeed. In that moment, I felt useless. As a photographer, as a volunteer, as a human being. I understood what helplessness is: being there, seeing everything, wanting to do something and knowing that it is not enough. Perhaps the reporter I am today was born precisely from that defeat. Not from courage. From the limit. From the moment you understand that a photograph can witness, can remain, can become memory. But it saves no one on its own. My interior fracture was discovering that the lens is not a shield. It brings you closer to things, then it leaves you alone with what you saw. And there you have to choose. When to shoot. When to stop. When to accept that certain images you will never bring home, because turning them into photography would have been less right than staying close to a person. From that point on, you no longer look for the strong photo. You look for the necessary photo. The one that does not exploit pain. It does not steal. It does not invade. It does not use the fragility of others to look powerful. The one that stays clean, even when it tells something dirty. A photograph that, years from now, does not make people say: “What a strong image.” But: “Now I understand.”

8. The Limit of Blood: What is the exact boundary between documenting a tragedy to provide a testimony and slipping into visual scavenging just to get a click? To which editorial compromise have you said (or would you say) “No, go fuck yourselves”, even at the cost of losing money and work?

My boundary is the dignity of the person. That is where I stop. Before the news, before the strong image, before the photograph that everyone would look at. I stop in front of a simple and enormous question: am I restoring humanity or am I taking it away? A photograph can have meaning even when it hurts. Sometimes it must hurt. It must force us to look at what we would like to avoid, leave a memory, bring out the human weight of what happened. An intensive care unit, an emergency, a border, a shaking hand: certain places and certain gestures tell more than a thousand words. But not everything I can photograph must become a photograph. With time, I understood that the point is not only what is in front of you, but why you decide to photograph it. If I shoot to make people understand, to witness, to give a face to something that otherwise would remain far away, then I can bear even the harshness of the image. But if I do it to show pain, look for the most obvious tear, the most recognizable body, the most exposed fragility, then I am betraying the person in front of me. And that betrayal, for me, is not worth any photograph. Refusing a five-figure gig is not just saying no to a job. It is saying no to a way of understanding photography. It is deciding that there are images that can pay you a lot, but then they ask you for something more expensive: your conscience. I feel this deeply. In front of the pain of others, I do not want to be someone who just takes. I do not want to transform a sick person into the symbol of a pandemic, a refugee into the symbol of a war, a rescuer into the convenient hero to celebrate, a dead or injured person into traffic for an article. I do not want a person to stop being a person just because my photography works. I have put down the camera more than once. In the hospital, at certain moments, I understood that some patients did not need a lens pointed at them. They needed a presence. A hand. Someone who would stay there without asking for anything. Sometimes they looked at me the way one looks at a son, a grandson, someone to trust for an instant. And in that instant, I could not shoot. It would not have been right. Perhaps I would have brought home a strong photo. Perhaps an editorial team would have chosen it. Perhaps it would have opened a piece. But I would have lost something that matters more: the right to stand in front of pain without betraying it. For this reason, I would say no to anyone who asked me for more blood, more face, more desperation, more recognizability just to make a story circulate. I would tell them: I am not delivering this photo. I am not giving you this person. Because for me, reportage is not taking everything that reality puts in front of you. It is choosing what you have the right to bring out. It is understanding that documenting does not mean possessing. It is remaining human even when you have a camera between you and the world. And sometimes the most honest photograph is the one you do not take. My limit is this: if a photo hurts the photographed person more than it serves collective memory, that photo is worth nothing.

9. The Secret Shot: What is that image you captured, a raw scene in a conflict or a moment of total vulnerability, that you decided never to send to the newsroom and keep only for yourself? Why did you choose to protect it?

My job is to witness. But witnessing does not mean possessing. It does not mean taking everything. It does not mean transforming every fragility into a proof, every wound into a page, every face into a symbol. If a photograph truly helps to understand, I bring it out. If it gives a voice, memory, meaning, then it has a reason to exist. But if it serves only to freeze a person in the worst moment of their life, then no. I keep it for myself. Or I leave it there, in the silence where it was born. Because sometimes protecting a photograph means protecting the person who would be inside it. And sometimes the most honest photo is not the one you shoot. It is the one you choose not to take. The phrase that makes me realize they did not truly see is: “Beautiful photos, but how sad. Enough with Covid now.” There. Right there I realize they understood nothing. They saw a mask, a gown, a ward, and they archived everything inside a convenient word: pandemic. A mental folder to close. Bad period. Past. Move on. But those were not sad photos. They were pieces of life crossed by real people. Eyes wide open at five in the morning when the body wanted to collapse. Hands looking for other hands. Nurses who stayed on their feet even when they had nothing left. Patients without children, without grandchildren, without anyone nearby, looking for a bit of family in the gaze of whoever entered the room. Saying “what beautiful images” or “how agonizing” is a lazy reading. It is looking without taking on the weight of what you are looking at. Those photos are not there to be beautiful. They are not there to move people. They are not there to hurt on the cheap. They are there so that one day nobody can say: “I did not remember it was like this.” It bothers me when a story is reduced to the effect it produces: strong, touching, heavy, moving. These are easy words. They make you feel something for ten seconds and then authorize you to move on. But behind those images there were shifts, wards, fear, silences, protections, authorizations, respect. There were people. There was no set. There was no pose. There was no desire to make a beautiful photograph. There was the need not to lose memory. Even saying “you were heroes” can become a shortcut. Because you applaud the hero, you put him on a pedestal and then you forget him. I did not want to make little saint cards. I wanted to photograph the people inside the uniforms. The fatigue behind the role. The fragility behind the duty. The human cost of staying on one’s feet while everything around was collapsing. The phrase that makes me angriest is: “Enough, let’s look forward.” Because looking forward without truly looking at what happened is not moving forward. It is erasing. It is washing one’s conscience. It is asking those who carried the weight to disappear in silence, now that it no longer serves the narrative. If one of my photos stays with you, it must not make you say “beautiful”. It must make you stay silent for a moment. It must make you wonder who was behind that face, what was happening outside the frame, how much it cost to remain human while the world could not wait to go back to normal. The most superficial criticism is calling them beautiful photos. Because if you see only the beauty, you have already missed all the blood, the fatigue, and the dignity that were inside.

11. The Chalk on the Wall: If your life ended tonight and you only had time to scratch one last, fottuto warning on the wall for the next generation of photojournalists—no academic lessons, no rhetoric—what would you leave written?

Do not enter the pain of others as if it were a room to cross. Do not enter it to come out with a photo in your hand. Enter it only if you are willing to come out different. Because in front of you there is not a scene. There is a life. There is someone at the most fragile, most naked, most exposed point of their existence. And that person owes you nothing. They do not owe you their face. They do not owe you their tears. They do not owe you their blood. They do not owe you their fear. They do not owe you their own dignity to allow you to build a strong image. The camera does not give you the right to take. It puts on you the duty to respond. It hands you a responsibility bigger than talent, bigger than the gaze, bigger than the need to prove how good you are. Because you are not there to prove you can see. You are there to understand if you have the right to stay. Shoot only when that photo can safeguard memory. When it can give voice to what would be erased. When it can restore something to those who can no longer speak. But lower the camera when the gesture becomes possession. When the click no longer tells, but steals. When the image serves no one but you. When the suffering of the other becomes material for your ambition. Do not look for the scene that strikes. Look for the necessary one. Do not look for pain to make it bigger. Look for the human being that pain risks swallowing. Do not look for blood. Look for what blood fails to say. And remember one thing: the pain of others is not yours. It is not a territory to conquer. It is not an opportunity. It is not a prize. It is not fuel for your name. It is a sacred boundary. If after photographing someone’s wound you can only think about how well the photo turned out, then you have already failed. You have stopped looking. You have stopped understanding. You have stopped being human. Because a photograph of pain must weigh. It must stay with you. It must take away your sleep, at least a bit. It must hold you accountable for the reason why you shot it. Leave memory, not trophies. Bring respect, not loot. Remain human, even behind the lens. And before shooting, stop. Ask yourself if you are telling a truth or if you are taking away something that does not belong to you. Do not photograph to take. Photograph only if you know how to give back.

12. White Space: This is your empty frame. Write, scream, or declare exactly what you want, without filters and without questions. Free space.

White space? Then I fill it with one thing only: respect. Not the one written in press releases. Not the one exhibited when convenient. Not the one used as a decorative word. True respect. The one that comes before the camera, before the badge, before the press pass, before the name under a photo. Photographing does not mean having the right to take everything. Reality is not a supermarket of pain. A fragile person is not material to be used. A marked face, a wounded body, a child, a sick person, a refugee, someone caught in the worst moment of their life owes nothing to those who tell the story. They do not owe their image. They do not owe their fear. They do not owe their vulnerability. Photography can tell stories. It can safeguard memory. It can carry far away what truly happened. It can be testimony, denunciation, responsibility. But it can also wound. Humiliate. Expose. Take away dignity. That is where those who communicate are measured: not in the apparent strength of an image, but in the necessity of publishing it. It is not enough to invoke breaking news to feel absolved. It is not enough to say “documenting” if what you produce identifies unnecessarily, exposes unnecessarily, strikes a person more than it helps to understand. Behind every image, there is someone who remains. Even after the click. After publication. After comments. After shares. They remain with their name, their face, their story, often with a wound that that photo can make permanent. The Treviso Charter should not be just a text to know. It should be an internalized limit. An ethical threshold. A voice that stops your hand when a face is not necessary, when a detail can identify, when a fragility risks generating attention without adding truth. The point is not to respect a rule. It is to build respect. And to transmit it. To ensure that whoever looks at a photograph does not consume a person, but recognizes them. That they do not stop to say “what a strong image”. That they understand that inside there is not a piece of content. There is a life. I have seen places where suffering did not need to be accentuated, loaded, spectacularized. It was already true enough. The task was not to betray it. To stay close without invading. To tell without possessing. To bring out a story without taking away dignity from those who lived it. For this reason, my white space is this: do not photograph to win over reality. Photograph to restore its dignity. And when you have a scene in front of you that pushes you to shoot, stop for a second. Ask yourself if you are telling someone’s story or using someone. If that image truly serves to understand, or serves only to strike. Because a photograph can be technically perfect. Powerful. Award-winning. Memorable. But if it unnecessarily exposes a person, if it reduces them to their wound, if it nails them forever to the most fragile moment of their life, then it is not testimony. It is a defeat. Mine, yours, everyone’s.