"Syracuse in lockdown", shots from silence

SYRACUSE - Deserted streets, silence interrupted by the chirping of birds and in the background the sound of the lapping of the waves in the marina. Perhaps an unrepeatable open-air set that served as a backdrop to the photos taken by Tiziana Blanco that were collected in "Siracusa in lockdown", the digital exhibition to discover the essence of the city during the isolation for the pandemic from Covid-19 .
    But this time the black and white shots are not exhibited in an art gallery or in a suggestive museum. In line with the new smart working and semi-isolation trends of phase 2, the images are visible exclusively on Libreriamo, (www.libreriamo.it), "the digital marketplace for those who love books, art and culture ", say the promoters of the site.
    Blanco recounts his city "cloaked in a sacred brightness: a journey away from the usual noise to rediscover the essence of places, a personal attempt to write with light the sensations felt in front of a different city".
    "Making Syracuse live on social and web as never seen before is a way to make one of the Italian beauties known to the whole world - says Saro found, curator of the digital exhibition and founder of Libreriamo -. The exhibition represents an innovative tool capable of doing territorial marketing in an original way and attracting the tourist interest of millions of people who will thus be able to rediscover our country. " "In my almost thirty years of activity as a photojournalist I have had to photograph various events and happenings - explains Tiziana Blanco -. I therefore could not avoid photographically freezing this historical moment, I had to at all costs immortalize Syracuse in that unique and unrepeatable situation , with no people around, in its total attractiveness; a bit like a beautiful woman who, having no need for frills, shows herself naturally, and who veils herself and reveals herself according to the occasion ". In a rigorous study of light without leaving room for color, the reporter's lens captures open perspectives and urban glimpses, where the chiaroscuro and the declination of grays speak in the well-defined lines of buildings and streets. Architectural elements with pure classic forms that meet the baroque sensuality of the buildings. This is how a rundown of places unfolds. But above all Ortigia in the foreground. "A stratified reading, which goes back to history in the various eras (Greek, Roman, Medieval, Arab, Norman, Aragonese, Baroque) up to the town and noble revival from the wounds of the earthquake of 1693. A mosaic of infinite stories of men and arts, "says Blanco. For the photographer Syracuse is a "land of a thousand faces, all dichotomous among them, apathetic and frenetic, gloomy and sunny, poor and rich at the same time, diffident and hospitable, opulent and decadent, melancholic and solar, firm and changeable. Light, perfumes, colors, sensations, incomparable emotions come together in Syracuse! I think those who see it for the first time, those who come back and those who live there, being in a certain place rather than another on the island, can think 'yes which is truly Sicily '". (HANDLE).