Solitude

photo: Owen O´Meara

invited guest: Tiberio Fanti (part two)

Gothic Town

The place we went to live
The world is strange, but our lives can be even more. These images are
from Saronno, the place where we opted to live or, as I should better
write, "to survive". My opinion about this small town some twenty miles
north of Milan has indeed slightly changed since we got off the train, for
our first time here, seven years ago. Soon after settling, a close friend
of my father warned me about the ugliness of this place. He had lived
here during a massive migration of the sixties, coming from a rural
village of central Italy. I stiffly answered I had to wait and see before
deciding. Now I'm pretty sure he was right.


Saronno is a post industrial town which lately converted itself into
a rather good and convenient place to live for those working and
operating in that big furnace of Milan downtown. The remains of
its past splendor are facing everyone and summarized in a cleverly
organized museum where I like to spend some of my spare time
together with my son. There are no historical witnesses, here.

Nothing comparable to the splendid roman and renaissance ages
sites of the small town where I grew up. Old barns and farmer
houses are slowly being converted into extraordinary and expensive
real estates, for the enjoyment of few lucky and well-off professionals.


The ghostly – but maybe I’d better write “gothic” – aspect of this place
comes out when I stop looking at the images I’ve always taken around,
trying to discover its intimacy, as well some signs left by past generations.
If only there was a collective soul, a connecting tissue, some fertile humus
for growing and improving ourselves, then it must be well hidden behind
the walls of these buildings absent-mindedly placed side-by-side.



There is, I feel, a sense of sadness and, at the same time,
disconsolate admiration for a place which has nothing else to
offer than the vestiges of its recent industrial past. All those huge,
grey, empty productive structures with their tall brick-chimneys and
rusted machineries, inevitably destined to demolition or to the natural
destructive effect of time; all those industrial-design cult objects, so
carefully collected and exposed in the halls of that local museum and
the disheartening and bare ugliness of the meadows surrounding the
town itself don’t let me trust there’s a single good reason for keep living
here and growing up our sons.


I know I’ll go away from here one day. I can’t say when but, today
more than ever before, I keep warm a sense of gratitude for that
friend of ours, who tried to open wide my eyes before coming here.
It’s never too late.








pictures and text by Tiberio Fanti

the old factory

Scharins was always my home since the first time I set my foot there.

The old factory that nobody would even care about, a area with a
contaminated ground that would cost so much to renovate. I spent
a lot of time there not really bothering the toxic ground and a lot
of other things. But the fact that the company that I was working at
was sacking personel and preparing to fire even more people
made me feel at home at the old industrial ground with its history.

I came to meet many different persons there, everything from young
people painting the walls unaware of the history there to old people that
had actually been there during the strikes in the 1930s. Still - to me it´s
a great mixture of people trying to find themselves no matter from what
generation. To me it meant a lot because deep inside history was still
alive within all the people I came to meet.

Pictures and text by Örjan Fredriksson

"M at Kim Weston' s Studio."

photo: Owen O´Meara