Upon deciding to reconstruct online the story of my many years’ career in the audiovisual sector, I asked myself what I should take with me that remained intact and still spoke volumes after 45 years, bearing witness to a history. I decided to take this photograph with me.

It was taken by Alfredo Bernacchia, an artist of great sensitivity and insight, during a visit to the Centrale Montemartini. Perhaps inspired by the industrial archaeology of a Rome that was being electrified – set against the backdrop of Roman sculpture – he kindly imagined immortalising my profile alongside that of Plato, and then reconstructing that ‘middle ground’ that you can see here.
Impossible comparisons aside, today it serves as the best foundation for wielding abstract thought and criticism as a weapon and a tool that remains fundamental to advancing any narrative one wishes to undertake. Of course, technologies have changed completely; of course, the digital revolution has opened up possibilities – and therefore narrative opportunities – that were unthinkable just a few decades ago, but it has also presented a challenge: to forge a distinctive language for a new way of storytelling, shaping its forms around our values and the depth of the history of thought and ideas that scientific development and the great classical tradition have laid before us. This conviction has enabled me to work on exploring narrative forms that pass on the past whilst reconstructing it, in a process of continuous metamorphosis. This is the significance of that photograph from long ago that I bring with me in today’s introduction.

IThere must be something innate in my love for the classics; just two years ago, a talented young photographer working on a project for the Archaeological Museum of Naples, Mauro Scaramella, took this other photograph.