In these troubled times filled with winds of war, resurgent nationalism, ethnic hatred and increasingly unjust and strident inequalities, and especially in a city like this one, invaded to bursting point by hordes of tourists and jubilee pilgrims, exhausted by the first heat of summer and indifferent, like the few Romans on the other hand, to the problems of the rest of the world, to cope with the despondency, I have enjoyed capturing the grotesque aspects of the rise of a new creed, of new rituals that unite people and dull the senses almost like social media: the religion of the Ice Cream God.
If the weapons of denunciation and invective are blunt in a city as indifferent, old and apathetic as this one, which transmits its neglect of itself and others even to those who visit it with the best of intentions, all that remains is to use a pinch of sarcasm: the women and men, visitors or locals, who crowd these photographs are intent on performing the ritual of eating ice cream in a pause of suspended time and space that gives this very normal momentary activity a universal and ridiculous character.
To paraphrase an old philosopher, I would say that here “ice cream is the opium of the people”.
