Pietro Coppa

The heat, the exhaustion, overtourism have a detrimental effect on many of those who visit Rome alone or in droves.

When we want to capture a person’s expression or thoughts, or portray them, we focus on the face or the full figure or on certain other elements…

Photography, by isolating a fragment from a continuum of time and space, is well-suited to producing images that capture this moment of ironically unstable equilibrium, of anticipation of which the subjects are unaware.

Photography is a rather strange art form: whilst it starts out as a realist art, one soon realises that things are a fair bit more complicated and ambiguous.

Dreaming of being shipwrecked in the land of the Phaeacians. Rome, Via Alessandro III, 20 January 2026. Suave, mari magno turbantis aequora ventisE terra magnum alterium spectare laborem;Non quia vexari quemquamst iucunda voluptas,Sed quibus ipse malis quia cernere suave est.(Lucretius, De Rerum Natura. Book II, lines 1–4) Lucretius had already…

It can happen that one photographs something solely for its form or for some mental association, without there being any obvious or clear reason to transform something as fleeting as a quantum fluctuation—which appears before the lens, giving shape to nothingness—into a finished image. Just as particles can appear out…

A few issues with the passage of time. Rome, Via San Francesco a Ripa, 25 March 2026. It may seem strange, but when I go out with a camera, I don’t have the mindset of a hunter; I don’t go looking for photographic subjects along a set route or according…

Time, too, remains suspended in an indeterminate limbo: there are no longer stories or fleeting, frozen moments…

I would simply like to let the images speak for themselves; the loneliness and isolation of men and women in the modern world have been discussed at length – perhaps even excessively so – over the last two centuries, and what more could I possibly add?

We speak of a metamorphosis when something changes its form and transforms into something else:the frog that becomes a prince after a kiss in a fairy tale, or Daphne, seized by Apollo, transforming into a tree in Bernini’s marvellous sculpture. These, however, are illustrated, didactic metamorphoses that leave no room…

With pride, a sense of duty, and justifiable satisfaction at a hard-won victory, the people in arms wave the sacred flag of the homeland, without asking themselves too many questions about what sort of homeland it is, and the war photographers are there, ready to capture that supreme moment; usually…

With a bit of luck, an eye for detail and a touch of irony, it is possible to extract interesting images even from the most banal and tedious aspects of daily life.

There are times when, in order to describe an atmosphere or convey moods through photographic images, I prefer to set aside human figures, transforming them from protagonists into extras, or eliminating them altogether. Sinuous shapes: emptiness upon emptiness. Rome, Lungotevere Vittorio Gassman, 22 January 2026. This is the case with…

Heroes are those people who, by performing extraordinary deeds, sacrificing themselves for some ideal or belief or for the common good, without perhaps questioning too much what exactly that means, illuminate an era and become models and cautionary tales for their contemporaries and for future generations, who award them effusive…

White on white, without a smile. Rome, Via Cipro, 20 November 2025. In many of the photographs I take, I have often found it fascinating to represent absence, that no man’s land where, once men and women have left, only abandoned objects remain, the debris of some ancient shipwreck, solitary…

Double portrait. Rome, Borgo Pio, 25 October 2025. First the flood, then the ebb. After immortalising the tight ranks of Landsknechts strolling through the city, the hordes of chanting pilgrims, the battalions of assault nuns camped in the streets, and the real or phony beggars following the marching armies, for…

Encampments. Rome, Largo del Colonnato, 1 July 2025. Rest after exertion, a break after the frantic rush here and there through streets and squares: like every army in history that has triumphantly entered the city, from Sulla’s legions to Alaric’s Goths, from the Landsknechts to the Piedmontese, even the compact…

The quintessential photographer. Rome, Via della Cuccagna, July 9, 2025. We live in times when words are losing ground to images. There are hardly any stories about trips or experiences anymore, no reflections or transmissions through spoken or written words. All that remains are souvenir photos or selfies, which merely…

From the days of Brennus, through those of Hannibal, the Goths, the Landsknechts, the medieval pilgrims so vividly described by Boccaccio, the Grand Tour of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, or more recently the Germans or the Allies, Rome has always been a sought-after destination: a metropolis that inspired wonder…

When you take the image of the human body and divide it into its constituent parts, then take some of these portions and transform them into autonomous images, you create a rhetorical figure called synecdoche, to use a term belonging to another field, “the part for the whole”. These parts,…