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The Bank of Italy Palace and its Fountain

The Bank of Italy building stands at Corso Cavour 4, at the entrance to Bari's Umbertine district, along the stretch between the Chamber of Commerce and the Teatro Petruzzelli. The site was occupied by the sheds of the so-called Iron Market when, in 1926, work began to a design by the engineer Biagio Accolti Gil; construction lasted six years and the building was presented to the city in October 1932, taking in the offices previously housed in via Cairoli. It rises over four levels plus a basement and deliberately adopts a Renaissance and Mannerist language instead of the Fascist-era style then prevailing: rusticated work and white stone define the lower band, while red brick cladding characterises the upper part, articulated by Doric and Ionic orders. The monumental entrance, preceded by a flight of steps, is framed by four columns supporting the ceremonial balcony from which the Italian and European flags fly. The large stone fountain seen in the foreground was built together with the palace and later transferred to the Municipality of Bari; it is still part of the city's ornamental fountain maintenance programme. Building and basin together have become one of the most recognisable images of twentieth-century middle-class Bari.

Piazza del Ferrarese and the Spazio Murat

Piazza del Ferrarese is the threshold between the nineteenth-century Murat district and Bari's old town: this frame shows it from Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, with the traffic light and the pedestrian-area sign marking the boundary beyond which the city can only be crossed on foot. The square began as the southern extension of piazza Mercantile and in the seventeenth century was still a small parade ground serving the guard post; at its centre, level with today's strada Vallisa, stood one of the gates in the city walls built under Philip III of Spain, designed to ease the movement of goods towards the market. The foundations of that gate and the original paving stones of the road survive in the excavation left open in the middle of the square. The present name appears in the eighteenth century and historians attribute it either to Girolamo Barucchelli, a native of Ferrara who owned property here, or to the ironsmith Stefano Fabbri, who built the neoclassical arcade. On the left stands the Spazio Murat, the old market building designed by Giuseppe Gimma in 1817, later demolished and rebuilt, and today a venue dedicated to art, architecture and research; the arcaded fronts closing the other sides belong to the former Fish Market, built by Vincenzo Capirri in 1837 and raised to two floors by 1903, and to Palazzo Traversa, built by Francesco De Giglio in 1914. Entirely pedestrian today, the square is the city's drawing room and the heart of its nightlife.

The Orecchiette Drying Frame of Arco Basso

Via dell'Arco Basso, in the heart of Bari's old town, is known as "the street of orecchiette": a fifty-metre alley where the pasta makers of Bari, the so-called "orecchiette ladies", shape fresh pasta on their own doorsteps. The tool that defines this everyday landscape is the frame photographed here: a folding wooden table with a mesh top that lets the air through and allows the pasta to dry evenly without sticking. The dough is made of durum wheat semolina and water only: it is rolled into a rope under the palm of the hand, cut into small pieces with a smooth-bladed knife, dragged across the work surface and turned inside out over the thumb to obtain the characteristic concave shape. The different shades of yellow visible on the trays reveal different drying stages, from freshly shaped pasta to pasta ready to be sold. Following the 2024 agreement between the Arco Basso pasta makers, the Municipality of Bari, the local health authority and the trade associations, home production and sale are now governed by precise hygiene and tax requirements, protecting a craft that remains one of the strongest identity marks of Bari's historic centre.

San Martino di Castrozza from Alpe Tognola

The camera position is on Alpe Tognola, the slope closing the basin of San Martino di Castrozza to the west, several hundred metres above the valley floor. In the foreground the snow-covered slope is scored by ski tracks and broken by isolated larches stripped of their needles; on the right the cabins of the gondola lift climb the line suspended above the snow, with a support pylon entering the frame from the top. Below, in the background, the village occupies the valley floor, while the opposite slope shows the runs cut into the wood.\r\n\r\nThe photograph records the layout of a high-altitude resort observed from its own ski area. The village is recognisable by its concentrated building density and by the prevalence of large accommodation structures, which in an alpine fabric stand apart from village houses in volume and alignment. The lift connecting the valley floor to Alpe Tognola carries the eye along the same axis as the camera position: the cabins are named after peaks of the area, and the one in the foreground, marked with the number 9, bears the name of Cima d'Asta.\r\n\r\nLight arrives raking from the right and lights the foreground slope, where the compacted snow holds the long shadows of the trees; the valley floor, by contrast, is already covered by the shadow of the slope and turns towards cold tones. Snow cover is continuous at every altitude in the frame, the runs on the opposite slope are in operation and the larches are entirely bare: the season is winter.\r\n

The basin of San Martino di Castrozza and the Pala front

The panoramic frame brings together in a single field the three planes that make up the landscape of San Martino di Castrozza. In the foreground the conifer wood closes the lower edge; beyond it, the band of snow-covered meadows is crossed by a road and holds a single isolated building; in the background the rock barrier of the Pala di San Martino group extends across the frame. The peaks follow one another from left to right: a relief with a pyramidal profile, a sector of closely set spires and, at the right edge, a pair of twinned towers. The arrangement of the planes sets out the altitudinal organisation of the basin. The valley floor is given over to meadows and settlement; above them the wood climbs the slope to the tree line; beyond that threshold the carbonate rock rises with no vegetation cover. The isolated building in the middle of the meadows belongs to the type of hay barn built for the seasonal use of pasture, and the road passing beside it follows the contour line rather than climbing the slope. Light reaches only the summits, where the rock takes on warm tones, while the band of wood and meadow stays entirely in shadow: the sun is already below the horizon for the valley floor and still lights the higher ground. The sky is cloudless and even in colour. Snow cover is continuous on the meadows and broken under the conifers, and among the trees some specimens carry no needles.