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Tokaido 53 Stations of Lorenzo Savoini

"The true traveler has no definite plan and has no intention of arriving."

Lao Tzu

The historic coastal road that connected the Edo of the Shōguns to imperial Kyoto today finds a new, profound conceptual contortion in Lorenzo Savoini's lens. Inspired by the famous ukiyo-e collection by Utagawa Hiroshige, Savoini not only geographically maps contemporary Japan, but captures its invisible resonances, transforming the journey into a spiritual and aesthetic investigation.

The project develops along a diagonal that crosses the soul of the country, starting from the remote and ghostly Osore-zan and ending in Hiroshima. It is not a simple landscape documentation, but a visual narrative that oscillates between the pop frenzy of the metropolis and the silence of sacred places. As the author himself points out, the work intends to move "by telling in 53 images the life and culture of today's Japan, particularly iconic for the new generations."

In this portfolio of 15 selected stations from Akihabara to Kōya-san photography becomes the perfect tool to crystallize transience. The fluctuating aesthetics of the ancient ukiyo-e is translated into a contemporary language that questions the present without nostalgia, highlighting its impermanence.

In Savoini's compositions, the physical path overlaps with the metaphysical one, taking shape, to use the photographer's words, as "a path through cities, mountains, countryside and sacred places [which] ends in Hiroshima, in its own way in a representation of Samsara."

It is a powerful visual work, where each shot acts as a stopping point for the gaze and a meditation on the continuous cycle of change of an entire nation.

Sonia Pampuri