I moved to Tokyo in 2011, on the day of my birthday.
I arrived with the naive belief that adaptation would be simple, that daily life would fall into place with time.
It didn’t. What I hadn’t accounted for was silence. The kind that forms when language and gesture fall short, when contact becomes a mirror with no reflection.
To escape the quiet weight of that loneliness, I turned to two things: walking and photographing.
They became habits, then rituals. A way to measure time, to stay sane, to fill the hours without naming them.
I walked through the suburbs of north-west Tokyo, past the city’s edge where the grid begins to thin.
It didn’t take long to see the structure beneath the chaos. Tokyo breathes along its railways.
Each station is a small sun, radiating activity within a fixed orbit, until the light fades and the streets dissolve into rows of low homes and walls of soft concrete.
That was the territory I chose.
The quiet parts.
The residential maze where life hides behind frosted glass and whispering hedges.
This project did not begin while I was walking. It surfaced later, in reverse, through the archive. Photo after photo revealed a pattern I hadn’t registered at the time.
Places erased.
Buildings gone.
Spaces I had visited more than once, no longer there.
It still happens.
What fascinated me then, like a crooked house, a rusted stair, or a patch of patterned tiling, is now flattened under car parks, prefab apartments, and convenience stores.
Tokyo does not preserve. It forgets with speed and precision.
It is a city rebuilt from within, endlessly.
Speculation eats memory.
In Florence, where I was born, everything holds.
Stasis is a form of pride.
Restoration is a civic language, even a performance.
The contrast is jarring. Not just between cities, but between two completely different relationships with time.
Tokyo builds like it eats.
Quick, efficient, forgettable.
This archive follows disappearance.
Not just what was, but the space it left behind.
Each image holds a tension.
Between presence and erasure.
Between what stood and what stands now.
Tokyo, in that sense, is a living organism.
It changes by morphing, as if forgetting were its nature.
( These photographs are a small portion of a larger body of work that will ultimately be published in a book )