Pietro Coppa

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,…

When touching a continent, one encounters not only things, landscapes, or cities, but also fleeting glimpses of the faces, figures, attitudes, and gestures of the people who live there.

Images from the cities of a continent as vast as China, passing by in the hasty, low flight of a comet that grazes the Earth before returning to deep space

Forgetfulness. Xi’an (China), 19 August 2025. Tourists are like comets flying at high speed near our planet: can they ever tell their companions in deep space about its infinite complexities and contradictions, having only glimpsed it for a few hours? If they are honest comets, certainly not. And so, returning…

Seeing people sleeping on the street, whether they are homeless people, tourists overcome by the heat, workers taking advantage of a break or fathers watching over their tired children, arouses in me a mixture of tenderness and alarm.

Animals are animals, a statement that seems so obvious as to merit no attention or further analysis, yet it is constantly contradicted by our behaviour, which tends to attribute human attitudes, thoughts or feelings that are foreign to them to the animals around us, making them something other than what…

Exchange of glances. Rome, Via Scossacavalli, 25 July 2025. Borgo is an ancient neighbourhood of Rome located between the Prati neighbourhood and the Tiber on one side, and between the Vatican and Castel Sant’Angelo on the other. It consists of a series of parallel streets that are not called “vie”…

The world turned upside down. Rome, Borgo Pio, 25 June 2025. This is not a systematic collection, preordained and structured in advance, but rather a series of fragmentary images of the city and its inhabitants, captured during the brief transition period between late spring and the first heatwave of summer.…

Photography isolates, captures a fragment, a moment from a succession of moments, and transforms it into an emblem.

Religious items. Rome, Borgo Pio, 8 May 2025. 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…

Nature reclaims its own. Bonito (AV), Via Roma, 1 May 2025. I have always loved photographs of objects, still lifes in which there is a subtle vein of melancholy, a sense of abandonment and uselessness, like objects shipwrecked on pavements or in the corners of cities, wrecks left there by…

It happens that when taking a photo, one has a clear idea in mind, but then, upon reviewing it, one realises that the eye or technique or some random interference has affected that idea…

Glare. Rome, Via della Conciliazione, 8 May 2025, 6:39 p.m. The photographs I present below were all taken in a very short period of time in the late afternoon of 8 May 2025 in Via della Conciliazione in Rome. That afternoon I was at home, I live near St. Peter’s…