Roma: lentezza (3c)

As I wrote in the last post, street photography in Roma is challenging. On one side there is plenty of action in the centre, but in this hyper-touristic setting - where everyone virtually is using a camera - it feels harder to do something special. Of course I could have tried to go in the periphery or semi -periphery, but again I felt I would simply have fallen back in the cliché pictures of the “borgate”.

I somehow wanted to try to look at the centre with new eyes.

A blog gave me an interesting idea: I should participate to “Lentezza” (slowness), a collective/social art initiative. The event was aimed at rediscovering the town, pushing participants to look at it outside the touristic paths and with new eyes.

Participants were invited to draw a word linked to the idea of “slowness”on a map of Rome, and then follow the path they traced on the map. The starting point for each path was Piazza dell’Orologio, in a nice orange tree garden which I never had visited before. The arrival point was the Trevi fountain. Each participant was given a kit, comprising post it (to write notes and comments and stick them on the walls along the path), a pencil, a map and some instructions.

Instead of walking I took my bike. This allow me to be honest and ride (slowly!) through the streets composing my path (the word “slow”), but also to explore other alleys, and take some pictures of participants as they were walking by following their paths. In same cases I chatted with them before taking pictures… Other times I followed people, and I discovered that it is possible to follow someone for a long time without been noticed! It was not always easy to spot the other participants as everyone in the centre of Roma seems to hold a map. An additional challenge was that post-it were also very small, and written with pencil, so they were hardly usable in pictures taken with a 24 (equiv 35) mm.

At the end of the walk all participants wrote an “haiku postcard” and left it to a souvenir seller in Piazza di Trevi. Everyone exchanged a few comments about their walk, waiting for 7pm, the moment when we were all supposed to freeze for a few minutes as statues. I froze - of course1 - in a position which could allow me to take pictures of the fellow walkers looking as statues as tourists walked around them.