Wandering Lonely

In 2009 photographer Roger Generazzo arrived in the region of Benevento, Italy, a small province situated about 150 miles southeast of Rome, to visit and photograph the landscape where his ancestors had lived and worked for centuries. He had imagined the region would look like the landscape of Florence, as he had seen it in the charming movie A Room with a View. He dreamed of seeing immaculate churches, perfectly built pensiones and villas, cultivated fields of crops, and the thriving nature of forests, meadows and olive groves. However, what he saw there, while photographing over a five-year period, appeared nothing like that. Every time Roger gazed around landscape he wondered if his ancestors had left the region because of the same economic hardships he visibly witnessed stretching across it. Since the world financial crisis of 2008, Italy itself has endured an economic recession, and everyone has suffered from it. Yet in the midst of a landscape filled with such atrophy and emptiness, Roger found beauty.