“Down by the river” began in the summer of 2022, one of the hottest in recent years, and continues in 2023, 70 years after Paul Strand settled in Luzzara (Italy) to write the book "Un Paese", accompanied with texts by Cesare Zavattini. The project does not want to replicate that experience but represents a personal vision of that territory today, a journey in which the imaginary of those places relates to the spaces, atmospheres and today's problems. I left from Luzzara to extend my exploration to the neighboring towns, in the area known as the "Terra di Po e dei Gonzaga". A journey along the banks of an increasingly dying river, on the trail of those lands. To meet those metaphysical landscapes that alternate with more earthly landscapes and understand what remains of the identity of those places and of provincial life. And what remains of that great river Po that has always been an essential presence, reassuring in its normal course and now disturbing in its current absence.

In the far southeast of Estonia, looking at the Russian soul from this side of Lake Peipsi, we meet the politically unrecognized region of Setomaa, self-proclaimed in 1994 by the Setos, his native people of Ungro-Finnic origin. Today more than ever, the Setos feel the need to preserve - especially for future generations - an identity that, over the centuries, has seen borders move like pieces of a puzzle, still unsolved today. The element that most distinguishes the Setos is a strongly identity culture linked to ancient traditions and indigenous customs. Hence the festive occasions, between the sacred and the profane, between the solemnity and the goliardia, become fundamental moments in which the Setos, Estonians and Russians, meet and try to defend their future and their uniqueness, above all trying to involve younger generations.