I met Serge Roche in Paris, at the Galerie Chastel Maréchal. It was 2006 and I found myself to be a guest at the first great retrospective event dedicated to the author, there working on a FMR assignment. I had never heard of him until then and, as always, I had not read up on this subject. I have always loved to face my subjects in an instinctive, almost animal-like way, so to capture the emotions.

La prima volta che fotografai un Almogavár avevo l'incarico di evidenziarne le caratteristiche peculiari. In una sala dell'incredibile villa ricolma di opere dei più grandi artisti lavorai con degli spot a cercare delle silhouettes suggestive e quando il Maestro vide il risultato ne fu entusiasta. Disse che con quelle luci così scandite avevo tirato fuori la "genesi di quell'opera".

Last September I had a great opportunity to take photos of the splendid National Gallery Collection of Cosenza, in the southern italian region of Calabria. It was a very demanding task and many of the works showed deeply toned areas , apparently showing no detail. Effectively, they were full of different shades and detail was quite amazing.

In 1991, I was working for Bugatti Automobiles. One day Franco Maria Ricci, who already desired to celebrate the myth of the Bugatti, suggested to Romano Artioli, the company owner, the idea of a book on the legendary label. They reached an agreement and the idea went through. Naturally, Artioli mention "the best photographer in the word" to Ricci, strongly encouraging my candidacy for the job. Ricci, as expected, was skeptical...

I have been working for a while with Leonardo3, with the collaboration of Hasselblad and Manfrotto, on high resolution reproductions of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings, Atlantic Code, The flight of Birds, and drawings from the Royal Library of Turin, one of which is the very famous "Self-portrait". A very complex, delicate but exhilarating work.

About seventy ivories from the twelfth century school of Amalfi, represent images from the Old and New Testament; these are kept at the San Matteo Diocesan Museum in Salerno. They are very finely hand carved and they have a unique charm, but, to this day, they are still pratically unknown. A wonderful exhibit, "The Medieval Ivories Enigma", introduced them to the public.

We had to shoot the facade of the Cathedral of Orvieto, one of the most famous and most photographed monuments in the world. What could we do? How could we create something never seen before? After a thorough research of the existent material, we realized that no orthogonal picture of the facade had been taken before. Few existed of the rose window or of the bas-reliefs and almost none, except for the small ones in the tour guides, of the beautiful timpano.