Through the Maze

A crowded silence

Ethiopia | Thursday, June 27, 2013 | 5 photos

I was born in Genoa, Italy, in 1982. I graduated in Politics in Milan and then in creative writing in Turin, at the Scuola Holden. I speak English, French and some German. I love motorbikes and Swiss army knives. I shoot with a Slr, a rangefinder (Olympus Om2, Zorky 2-C) and a Dslr (Olympus E510).
In the spring of 2010, after 20 hours of flight, I landed for the first time in Africa. Addis Ababa swallowed me in a minute. I spend one month there and I travelled quite a bit and. Right from the start, I was fascinated by two places: markets and temples.
Markets in Addis Ababa, are some of the best places to understand a culture and a country. Meat, salt, spices, animals and people, all packed together in places that even though are bigger than any market elsewhere, always look tiny and on the verge of exploding.
Temples, on the other hand, are majestic and almost unreal: both the temples of Gonder, carved out in the pink pale rock and the churches in the capital, are places of extreme beauty and silence. In the end, markets and temples, tell a similar story: they show rhythm, spirituality and dignity; they inspire the same crowded silence that asks for respect and admiration.