Schloss Charlottenburg

Berlin/ Germany

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Dresdner Zwinger

Dresden/ Germany

To conceive beauty, to give it form, to convert the idea into an image, the concept into matter and the soul and dreams into a corporeal reality, is a laborious miracle that brings the human being closer to the divine.

To destroy it is, on the other hand, monstrously simple.

And to reconstruct it is a Herculean task, but one that surpasses, in its power, poetry and allegorical force, the very act of its creation.

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Tiergarten

Berllin/ Germany

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Dresden/ Germany

I must reconsider my earlier "reflections". Dresden was an amputated city without the Frauenkirche and it had to be rebuilt, no doubt about it. The empty, ominous space formerly occupied by this landmark building was a coup de grace to beauty and a futile way of sacrificing not only the skyline, but the very soul of the city. According to the "logic of eternal punitive ruin", there would also have been no reason to reconstruct other Dresden buildings, such as the Semperoper or the Zwinger. The -inevitable- question is clear: what damage or crime does the perpetuation of destruction repair?

I've enjoyed photographing Dresden from the point of view of an Italian Vedutista painter, with all the shortcomings imposed by my technical and aesthetic limitations. Dresden is a beauty and lends itself to multiple gazes. Here I show the one I personally prefer.

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Schlossgarten Charlottenburg

Berlin/ Germany

I arrived at the gardens of Schloss Charlottenburg just as it was beginning to get dark. The sun played with the thick clouds and showed its last rays only for brief moments, as if in the ritual of a courtship. The marvellous Palace loomed in the background, like a mist, like a reality more imagined and dreamt than contemplated. A cyclist, a runner and a few more solitary souls, perhaps ten, at most twenty, wandered through that paradise as immense as it was intimate, absorbed in its elegance and in its rare and timeless beauty: those gardens were the most faithful reflection of our dreams, of our chimeras and of our intimate, sought-after and deeply desired solitude. An old man, even more solitary than the rest of the souls on the stage, gazed at the beautiful lake that stretched to the far horizon of the palace: he seemed to contemplate, with serene lucidity, and without a hint of melancholy, the contours, each day more defined, of his own farewell.

I have seldom felt so much fulfilment and been happier.

I love Berlin.

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