“Venice occupies the center point of its lagoon, which is eight miles at the widest, and thirty miles long. This center is all that most visitors see today,” Sean Wilsey writes in “Open Water,” his piece in last week’s Journeys Issue. Wilsey recalls learning how to row a gondola around Venice as a child, and describes his return to Venice and its surrounding islands nearly twenty years later.
The Italian photographer Stefano de Luigi, whose photographs accompany Wilsey’s article, visited these islands. They are mostly abandoned now, and until recently one was the site of an infectious-diseases hospital. “Working on a project about Venice—avoiding common clichés—is like jumping from the third floor without hurting oneself,” de Luigi told me. “It’s hard but not impossible.” He said that travelling between islands was like “working on these memory traces, following the tracks of past lives and interpreting nature’s assault to human presence.”
Below is a selection of de Luigi’s photographs and a video. Click on the red arrows [#image: /photos/59096bf8019dfc3494ea17c9]for a full-screen view.
Photographs and video by Stefano de Luigi/VII.
