A woman once told me: “You should go to Venice and take photos of women“. At first, I thought she was just teasing. But Venice — La Serenissima — wouldn't let the thought go: her streets, her waters, the women who move through them. One idea led to another, one envisioned portrait invited the next, until it became clear that the project was no longer about photography alone.
Venice still ignites passion and stories: a city of extraordinary beauty, an illustrious past, a long decline, and today a place that continues to generate curiosity—especially among women. For an artist in the making, it is where intuition first finds its expression and gradually becomes the work itself.
Every meaningful portrait begins with a simple assumption: another human being is always greater than the image that can be made of her. A photograph can describe a face, but it can never contain a person.
Every woman carries a world that extends beyond the frame—memories, contradictions, hopes, silences, and stories that no camera could fully capture.
I don't try to capture everything about a woman. I just try to be genuinely present with her for an hour.
Beauty may invite the encounter; curiosity is what sustains it.
Photography becomes an opportunity to pay attention—to slow down, listen, and share a moment of genuine presence. Before there is a portrait, there are people sharing time, conversation, and a pause. The photograph is the visible trace of an encounter, much as a dream leaves behind not its images, but its mood.
Women of Venice is a collection of portraits and stories born from moments throughout the city.
The intention is not simply to photograph women as subjects to be explained, but to bring souls into conversation. Venice lends its atmosphere to the images, while each woman, through her presence, gives something of herself back to the city.
Together they create a dialogue in which both reveal something beyond themselves.
Some encounters reveal their meaning only after the camera has been put away. What remains is not simply the photograph, but the echo of a shared moment—the conversation, the attention, and the quiet feeling that, for a brief instant, lives genuinely crossed.
The ancient Greeks distinguished between two kinds of time.
Chronos is measured time: schedules, deadlines, calendars.
Kairos is lived time: the moments that feel completely present.
Every portrait session begins in Chronos and, if all goes well, ends somewhere closer to Kairos. Photography becomes an excuse to step outside ordinary time—to slow down, to notice, to listen, and to meet another person with undivided attention.
The name echoes John Ruskin's celebrated The Stones of Venice (1851): if the stones of Venice hold countless precious stories, her women hold even more. Hence: Women of Venice.
The project rests on two pillars: art for its own sake, and an economic model that allows it to endure and grow—portrait sessions, fine-art prints, and, in time, a book and an exhibition.
At its foundation stands one principle: every woman remains the main shareholder of her own image. Nothing is published without her written consent. Should the project generate value, part of that value returns to those who gave it a face.
Built entirely from the ground up—the website, the digital consent system, the archive, and the delivery pipeline—the project is designed to grow organically, one portrait, one story, one encounter at a time.
Long after the photograph is taken, what remains is not the image, but the meeting that made it possible.