I built this scene myself. It isn't a memory, and on this blog I don't sell memories I haven't got. Wednesday 28 October, Lucca. Picture the queue at the gates: shoes soaking up the damp from the city walls, the smell of printed paper mixing with the fried food from the stalls. In front of you there...

  Naples, early December 2024. A ground-floor hall, 4.30pm. The client had launched a contest between the teams at his company. Each team was putting together a performance. My job was to shoot stills and video of everything: the backstage and the event itself, for social and company channels, ...

Santa Maria Capua Vetere, 7.15am. The damp rising off the stone blocks of the Campanian Amphitheatre cuts right through you, even in the middle of spring. The air smells of the first vans' diesel, wet earth and that short coffee the bar opposite burns every Tuesday morning without fail. Berto is sit...

A Tuesday in late November, 5.42pm. The Circumvesuviana to Poggiomarino creaks at Napoli Garibaldi, about to set off for Portici. Outside, the rain isn't falling, it's hammering, driven by the scirocco, and it's turning the pavements along corso Lucci into a bog of soggy paper. Inside, the air smell...

Portici, Granatello pier, 1990. It's pouring, and the car is parked along the pier, the windows steamed up from the inside until nothing gets through any more. It's not the Granatello you know today, the nightlife spot, the city's living room. In 1990 the port area was something else entirely. Even ...

  Piazza Adriano, Santa Maria Capua Vetere. It's a Thursday in October, twenty past seven. The light comes in low and creeps across the still-wet paving, a stone's throw from the Anfiteatro Campano. Inside the bar you can hear the sharp knock of the portafilter against the edge of the knock box...

Wednesday 14 October 2026, Santa Maria Capua Vetere. Every morning, before coffee, there's half an hour that can't be shortened. I don't spend it staring at the wall: I pick up my phone and read the news. Meanwhile, as I read, the world starts moving around me. Magda getting ready, the coffee machin...

  Thursday evening, October, a Hackney pub not far from City Road. The rain isn't falling: it hangs in the air, mixed with fog, and gets into your coat right down to the bone. Inside, the air smells of damp brick, of pale ale spilt across wooden tables, of vinegar escaping from opened packets o...

Quartieri Spagnoli, a Tuesday in November, 7.40am. The alley is just wide enough for two scooters to brush wing mirrors. The bar on the corner has already fired up the coffee machine; from a ground-floor basso comes the smell of washing hung out to dry. Stop beside an iron grate, where the rust has ...

  It was a Tuesday evening in late November. Outside, a cold wind swept the Granatello pier in Portici, rippling a black sea that seemed to swallow the yellowish glow of the street lamps. Inside, in the second-floor room I was using as a makeshift studio, I'd switched everything off. The only l...

Friday morning, 9 October 2026. On the Granatello pier in Portici, there's that damp wind that gets into your bones and makes you regret leaving your coat at home. I walk into the usual bar. It's 7.40am, and the air smells of sea salt, warm cornetti and coffee roasted a touch too dark. The grinder d...

  October 2026, I'm in London, in my office on City Road. I've got a job to do that I've done plenty of times before: extend a user's access on the platform of one of my client's suppliers. I open the screen. Washed-out blue bands, white lettering, a menu on the left with four items. None ...

  November 2013. Five months earlier, Olga had died: my wife since 2003, and the person I'd founded the agency with in 2006. I didn't know what to do with my days any more, so I decided to go back to Umbria for a few days, to Bevagna. It was there that a friend told me about two old, abandoned ...

It was a Tuesday evening in early October, and London was doing that fine, thin rain they call drizzle. I was in the back room of Bobby's shop in Southwark, a stone's throw from Borough Market. The air smelled of roasted coffee, damp cardboard and mature cheese. Bobby has three shops selling Italian...

  Santa Maria Capua Vetere, my office, a Saturday afternoon. The book would come out a little over a month later, but I couldn't have known that then. I had a decent espresso in front of me and some research to finish: working out which of the self-publishing platforms was the best choice. I wa...

  More than once, the sat nav has taken me up mountain roads I didn't know, at night, in the Campanian interior: the Alburni, Cervati, the area around Bocca della Selva. I can't pick out one evening in particular. I remember how it went every time: the world shrunk to the cone of the headlights...

It was a Tuesday evening in October 2025. It was chucking it down in Caserta, that heavy rain that sends the drains overflowing near the Royal Palace and takes away any wish to leave the studio. It was 10pm. The room smelt of burnt coffee, mixed with the damp warmth of the radiators and the cold lig...

December 2022, the last few days before Christmas. In my studio in Santa Maria Capua Vetere there was that typical buzz of the season: a festive mood that creeps into offices too at that time of year. On my screen was Pasquale, a friend from Portici who'd moved to London a few years before. He was h...

It was October 2004. The damp in Portici got into your bones from the moment you woke up, that wet cold that rolls up from the Granatello and creeps under your clothes. I'd set up the studio in an old barrel-vaulted storeroom. Three Profoto heads, a soft main light, a fill bank, a hard backlight to ...

  It's a Tuesday at the end of October, and Berto's office, in a warehouse unit on the industrial estate between Santa Maria Capua Vetere and Capua, smells of scorched moka pot and cardboard fresh out of the stockroom. Berto has a printout in front of him. Forty-three names: long-standing clien...