date » 02-08-2026 17:26
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tags » vir' o mare quante è bello spira tantu sientimentooo, beach italy southern, daylight, olympus c 5060 wz, thumberwald, summer time italy, allah akbar,
© archive manunzio
Vir' o mar' quant'è bello spira tanto sentimentooo
If we are going to lay down the truth let's give it the full narrative weight, the proper bite of satire, and the sweeping tribute that both the method and that immortal piece of Japanese hardware actually deserve it.
They say the camera makes the photograph. Right?...and
who am I to argue with such profound, enlightened wisdom (well mercenary payied)?
It was clearly not the human behind the viewfinder who recognized the sheer visual comedy of a street sign reading Via Cristoforo Colombo planted dead-center on the horizon line, jutting straight out of the pebbled shoreline into the vast blue expanse. It was certainly not a photographer who had the audacity, the patience, and the old-school discipline to plant their feet on that exact stretch of promenade, transform a trivial piece of coastal infrastructure into a theatrical stage, and wait. No, no. We must render unto Caesar—or rather, unto Olympus—what belongs to the machinery....continue...
date » 31-07-2026 16:45
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tags » street photography, night photography, street epson 850 z, light avaible, summer time, thumberwald,
© archive manunzio
An italian summer night
Like a late-night summer whisper—the kind that hangs in the heavy, warm air when time seems to stall. The image is (seems) a suggestion, a spark that calls back a distant interview from 1963 in L'Europeo, Oriana Fallaci (Italy’s fiercest, most unsparing journalist) pushing to corner him, and Totò—Antonio De Curtis (the undisputed prince of Italian comedy and tragicomedy)—laying his cards on the table without an ounce of rhetoric.
When she asks if he is happy, he dismantles the very idea of happiness as a permanent state:
"Happiness, my dear young lady, is made of moments of forgetfulness."
He goes on to call them "tiny, minuscule moments when you forget the bad things."
That is precisely (I thinks) what real photography is: a moment of forgetfulness sliced out of time. When you press the shutter on a frame like this—the man, the half-figure locked in shadow, the burning ember—you freeze a fragment where the rest of the world just fades out. Erased.
In that fraction of a second, there are no trivialities, no background noise, no before and no after. There is only the sheer impact of an instant that demanded to be recorded. Totò turned it into a philosophy of survival; with a camera in hand, if we’re paying enough attention, we turn it into physical proof.
P.S. The image itself is a crop from an Epson 850Z — a digital pioneer packing an unusually fast zoom lens for its era, pushing the sensor to its raw limits to bite off this single detail from the night.
date » 08-06-2026 11:33
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tags » potenza my town, southern italy in strange hour summer time, black and white, day photography, street photography, thumberwald compà, analogic era,
© archive manunzio
Ciunnella (as My Africa)
As No any regular clock, this afternoon of whispers and blindin' reflections is sparklin' all along the walls of the Società elettrica lucana— at this time Enterprise called Enel today a big energy. The sun is playin' hide-and-seek with the shadows of the Montereale pine forest up above, a holy kind of woods wrappin' up the trashman’s shack, white like lime, lookin' like some cheap Western movie western set.
Right at the edge of the cliff underneath, wide open there’s that evil, cracked-up ugly big building. On the right side, between the retaining walls and the slopes, rivers of open sewage are top-spillin' straight down toward the garage-workshop of the Calabro-lucana railway.
Behind those walls, a fuckin' beehive is boilin' with raw humanity, leanin' out of balconies with rusty-ass iron railings. Bare-chested kids walkin' barefoot, slops, manure, donkeys brayin', big spitters on the floor, mothers screamin' fit to die, and broken straw chairs with clothes hangin' to dry in the sun. Sows, rabbits, chickens, all mixed up together, no stop, no distance.
Far away, in a dog day of summer stay the taxidriver (of Piazza Prefettura—Piazza Matteotti,) elbows on the railing, is the starin' staring into space And he mutters to himself ca s' la 'ntend'—that the guy is screwin' around with a mother o. And he takes a quiet drag from his Nazionale cigarette while slickin' back his greasy hair, his eyes lingerin' on the common wood box (Wc): a shitter with three planks around it just for a joke of privacy, two holes in the ground, and the whole fuckin' countryside open right on the horizon line.
You see? No Hollywood stars here. This is raw, sun-burnt land . Shadows so black they stain your fingers, and light so sharp it cuts like a razor. Go home Yankee!
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