What is left

I'm spending the last days of my professional experience in Milan. This is my last week in Vimodrone, where I landed in a hot and humid June 2000 to start a new life with my wife, and I strive to think if I'll ever come back here again, once I'll be out of office next Friday.

Never say never. No one can tell what will happen to me and my family in the coming years. Only one fact is sure: in a few weeks I'll be working abroad, no longer as a business traveler but as a real expatriate. "Man gewöhnt sich daran!", You get used to it! This is what I've been silently repeating to myself in the last weeks.

When I first came here I told to my interviewer that I was going to stay at least for a couple of "seasons". As a matter of fact, I settled and stayed here for sixteen years and I grew up a family. I've dedicated all my freshest and best energies to the company and the people I'm about to salute.

I have no regrets. If I turn back and look at what I'm leaving, everything looks like an old "Cascina" still functioning and full of life when I arrived and left falling apart among the multitude of industrial buildings that covered the countryside in the meantime.

(Made and sent from my mobile.)

N.C.

A Step into the City

There are two kind of weather that make you really appreciate the skyline of Milan. One is the "typical" foggy day, but it's not the best for the City. The other one is the January wind swept sunny afternoon.

The Naked Fig Tree

The last showers of these days have completely undressed the fig tree in the orchard under my window. Now, there's anything more left to cover its nudity. Could it be a sign that the "never arrived" Winter season is really gone till next year?

Written for the Wind

I don't remember by heart having ever listened to some peg music ...

Saturday Morning

(Made and sent from my mobile.)

Saturday Morning

It's time to play in the kitchen.

(Made and sent from my mobile.)

We are shadows

Milano, Garibaldi underground station.

It's surprising how a badly made shot can turn into an evocative picture.

(Made and sent from my mobile.)

Black Coffee with Milk

(Made and sent from my mobile.)

Swedish Interiors

I can't remember by heart how many pictures I've taken in nearly eighteen years of digital photography. An simple inquiry on my storage devices could return scaring numbers. I stopped counting them a long time ago. As a matter of fact, for years, during my travels in Northern Europe I used to shoot everything I saw and store them in the HD as soon as I was back home, in wait for better times.

Those better times never arrived. Nevertheless, from time to time it happens to dig into the folders for some other reasons and stop on shoots that I forgot about. Simple pictures, some times taken in prohibitive conditions and apparently meaningless to anyone else but me.

So, this afternoon I fell into a folder where the following two pictures had been thrown. They were taken with an old mobile telephone of mine. The original images are really poor but the process I applied to convert them to B&W made things better, turning them into something good enough for publishing.

They were taken in Mölndal, in the old Ericsson premises were the product unit I belonged to was based. At that time a total restructuring operation had just been announced and several offices had been left empty, or almost.

Empty spaces have always been my favorites for long discussions on the phone or for short leg-stretching walks during a coffee break. In one of those rooms, right on the windowsill I spotted some decoration items, left as if the room had just been abandoned under a fire alarm. Items brought in office to make it look like warmer, as our own apartments and then surprisingly forgotten, abandoned.

(A Swedish Window)

The glass bowl on a typical Swedish styled piece of furniture, that I wondered if it ever had been used for any purpose, was another example. Laying on a parquet floor full of screws rolling around and each of my steps was worth of a modern art installation, that I couldn't disregard.

(A Swedish Meeting Table)