Pietro Coppa

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…

Breaking into an amorous discourse. Rome, Viale Fratel Porfirio Ciprari, April 23th 2025. Sometimes some disturbing element, some unexpected detail that ironically or dramatically modifies the sense of the image sneaks into a photograph, like a harassing and irrepressible thought. Whether this happens by chance, so the photographer must be…

Men and women, when we see them outside their private sphere, are almost always intent on doing something, either for work or for fun. These are activities that are carried out with seriousness and concentration, regardless of the fact that to an unfamiliar eye, perhaps even armed with a hint…

In this world we are all passing through. Fleeting passages in front of the photographer’s lens then, like timeless ghosts.

”Look at Gabriele Basilico’s strange City!” suggest the ancient statue. Rome, Museum of Palazzo Altemps, December 19th 2024. Ever since work began to beautify the City for the Jubilee 2025, someone, I suppose from the municipality of Rome, came up with the ingenious idea of sprinkling the fences of the…

Since time immemorial, human beings have been talking, it is one of the salient characteristics of the human species: they chat to each other, they converse with real people, things or symbols, they talk to distant people through the ubiquitous mobile phones, they even make inanimate objects talk to each…

Beneath the surface that the City presents to us, banal, serious and unimaginative, lives another, more ribald and jaunty city that occasionally sends out some smoke signals: perhaps the irony of some fortuitous juxtaposition, or some absurdity that pervades, like a barely perceived perfume, the things and people that inhabit…

The City sleeps, indifferent and anaesthetised passes by the less fortunate as if they were useless objects beached on benches and pavements. And it happens to me, like almost everyone else, to ignore them, not seeing them asleep in the street in the enchanted and dangerous sleep they share with…

The Odd Couple: Laurel and Hardy. Rome, Lungotevere Castello, January 9th 2025. A part of the wildlife has always adapted to the new habitats created by us, a prime example being mice, our unwelcome companions for millennia, as well as numerous other mammals such as raccoons, foxes, hedgehogs, squirrels, lately…