This publication is the second book illustrating a collection of interiors, and it follows the first, published a few years ago. The volumes present a selection of rooms with typical Italian interior decoration features. Each country has its own unique characteristics and idiosyncrasies that appear in tiny details, arrangements and, of course, aspects of the architecture and organization of the interior.
Here Mario Ciampi's camera has subtly explored how these factors interact, offering views of rooms that may be filled with sumptuous furnishings or, equally, may be harmoniously unfilled. His images prove that an interior is simultaneously a structure, a container, and even its own stage. The chemistry of light, colour and material textures evolves reactions that may seem random, but are actually the result of carefully considered intentions.
Some of the homes depicted are famous, their lengthy histories known to all, while others are not. Their appearance may be engraved in the minds of many of us and we may not even be aware of it. Everyone remembers the ballroom scene in Luchino Visconti's The Leopard, filmed under the atypical ceiling of Palazzo Gangi in Palermo. Yet far fewer will remember the many scenes that Visconti shot in Villa Godi Malinverni for another of his masterpieces, Senso. Fewer still will recognize the Galleria Colonna as the backdrop for the press conference at the end of Roman Holiday, starring a young Audrey Hepburn.
However familiar these rooms may or may not be, they are part of historical memory and survive in all of us, the living testaments of long-gone architects, painters, stuccoists and nameless artisans who crafted the interiors. They also bear the stamp of owners old and new, who have handed down the seed of memory from which Italian style blossomed.
