In Search of Silence

For years, I travelled in search of people who had chosen to disappear.
Or at least, that is what I thought I was doing.

I crossed mountains, forests, deserts, and remote landscapes to meet men and women who had deliberately stepped away from the rhythms of contemporary society. Some lived in caves, others in small huts or isolated shelters. Some belonged to religious traditions, while others followed no formal faith at all.

At first, I imagined solitude as a form of absence.
I was wrong.
The people I met were not escaping the world. In many cases, they seemed more present within it than most of us.
Their lives were stripped of many of the things that structure our own existence: schedules, deadlines, social expectations, constant communication. Yet what remained was not emptiness. It was attention.

Attention to the passing of light.
Attention to weather, seasons, and landscape.
Attention to silence itself.

We often think of silence as a lack of sound, a void to be filled. But the longer I spent with hermits, the more I understood that silence is not the opposite of life. It is another way of experiencing it.

The contemporary world encourages us to remain connected at all times. We move quickly from one task to another, one notification to the next, one image to another image. We consume information at a speed that would have been unimaginable only a generation ago.

Yet despite unprecedented levels of connection, loneliness has become one of the defining conditions of our age.
This paradox fascinated me.

The hermits I met had chosen physical solitude, but many seemed remarkably free from the loneliness that permeates contemporary society. Their isolation was not a withdrawal from life. It was an attempt to engage with it differently.

Of course, I do not wish to romanticize their existence.

Hermitic life can be difficult, uncomfortable, and demanding. It requires sacrifice and resilience. It is not a path that most people would choose, nor should it be.

What interests me is not the possibility of becoming a hermit.
It is the questions hermits raise simply by existing.

What do we actually need?
How much noise are we willing to accept before we can no longer hear ourselves think?
What happens when we stop measuring life through productivity, visibility, and constant activity?

These questions accompanied me throughout the years I spent working on Into The Silence. Hermits of the Third Millennium.
They continue to accompany me today.

As the project returns to public exhibition at the Italian Photography Festival 2026, I find myself returning to the same thought that first drew me to these lives.
Perhaps silence is not an escape from the world.
Perhaps it is another way of entering it.
And perhaps, in an age defined by acceleration, silence has become one of the most radical choices we can make.