The Sancta Sanctorum project occupies that rare territory where photography ceases to be mere representation and becomes interpretation of space.
Far from the rhetoric of wine promotion, the project strips away all immediate narrative elements—bottles, labels, vineyards—to focus on the invisible essence of the cellar: its emotional architecture.
The images do not seek to document, but to evoke. The absence of the final product forces the observer to question the place itself, to read its geometries, its material stratifications, its contrasts of light and shadow as traces of an untold story. It is in this gap that the space for art opens up: what remains is not the practical function of the space, but its aura.
Each shot becomes a meditation on the suspension of time. The barrels become columns of a silent temple, the corridors are transformed into perspective escapes reminiscent of underground cathedrals. Light—natural or artificial—becomes plastic matter, drawing volumes and suggesting almost musical rhythms.
Sancta Sanctorum is not a reportage, but an act of subtraction: by eliminating the most obvious “visible,” it reveals the “invisible” that defines the true identity of a place. It is a choral work in which each winery participates as an autonomous chapter of a larger story, a mosaic of atmospheres that, although different, share the same tension toward mystery.
A Modular Project
Sancta Sanctorum is a broad, modular project that includes a publication and an international exhibition.
The book brings together portraits of Italy's most evocative wine cellars: no bottles, no labels, no commercial celebrations, just space, light, shadow, and silence. It is a story that restores aesthetic dignity and poetic power to what usually remains invisible, relegated to the background of the narrative of wine.
The volume is not a catalog but an art object: a poetic archive intended for those who see the cellar not only as a place of work but as a microcosm full of symbols, memories, and silences.
The publication is accompanied by a photographic exhibition, intended for trade fairs, institutional events, and museums in Italy, as well as international circuits such as festivals, Italian Cultural Institutes, and events dedicated to art and wine. The exhibition is designed to spread a new idea of the cellar: not simply a container for wine, but a place of beauty, memory, and identity.
The Sancta Sanctorum project is not just this: it is an invitation to recognize the winery as an aesthetic and identity heritage, a place where time becomes space and silence becomes a story.
Work in progress ...
The following photographs are the first whispers of a journey that is still in its infancy. They are quiet flashes of the atmosphere I am chasing: the suspended calm, the slow passage of time, the subtle voice that dwells among the barrels and breathes with them. In these images, I sought not only feeling, but that delicate dialogue between form and emotion, between the ancient texture of a wall that has stood for centuries and the balance of the voids that welcome light. Architecture thus becomes part of the story: a gesture that guides the gaze, a rhythm that accompanies the silence as darkness allows itself to be traversed and stillness becomes matter. These photographs are a prelude, a threshold that introduces the world I wish to describe. Each cellar has a different soul, its own heartbeat, but this same sweet twilight always returns, this embrace of stillness, this echo that speaks without words. The journey has just begun. Each new barrel cellar will add a nuance, a sudden light, another silence. And it will be the cellar itself, like a living organism, that will guide my gaze and the next poem to emerge.
Castello di Uviglie "cava di pietra da cantone" (Rossignano Monferrato - AL)
Castello di Razzano (Alfiano Natta - AL)
Gancia (Canelli - AL)
Marchesi di Barolo (Barolo - CN)
Poderi Einaudi (Dogliani - CN)
Poderi Gagliardo ( La Morra - CN)
Fontanafredda (Serralunga d'Alba - CN)
Mascarello (La Morra - CN)
Contratto (Canelli - AL)
Coppo (Canelli - AL)
Marchesi Incisa della Rocchetta (Rocchetta Tanaro - AT)
