How many times have you heard (or exclaimed) “I just want to go travel around Europe and see everything for a couple months!” It is almost mundane how easily we seem to throw around that ambition, yet very few are given the opportunity and have the tenacity to actually go there, to actually see it.
Fortunately, you only have to go as far as the University Union Gallery to experience a more affordable, less strenuous act of vicarious travel. Senior business major Jamie Antonioli spent the summer of 2006 abroad, trekking Europe, studying at an art school in Florence, Italy and capturing it all with her 1979 Nikon SE.
Accompanied by travel buddy and landscape architecture senior Megan Whitney, Antonioli packed several countries into two weeks before beginning her studies in Florence. The pair hit up London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, Biarritz (a city on the southern coast of France) and San Sebastian, Spain before ending up in Florence.
Antonioli’s photography exhibit, “When in Rome,” captures the historic cities she witnessed during her travels through Italy, including Rome, Florence, Venice and the less-touristy Mediterranean coastal town Cinque Terre.
“Cinque Terre means five lands,” explained Antonioli, who took her favorite photograph in Riomaggiore, one of the five fishing villages in Cinque Terre. “Everywhere was big cities and I wanted to see the ocean. (Cinque Terre) was just beautiful, clear water.”
The exhibit will likely be perceived differently by different people – to those who haven’t been to Italy, it is a fresh and beautiful glimpse into the cities there, focused less on the cliché and more on the aesthetic of the Italian architecture.
Those who have already been will probably be met with surprise at how shrewdly Antonioli captured the ramshackle nuances that are easy to overlook, such as the texture of a sculpted face in the Boboli Gardens or the detail of Florence’s central structure, the Duomo.
“I had people say they had been to all the places (in the photographs) and hadn’t noticed that thing,” Antonioli said of her reception earlier this month. While all the photographs are pleasing to look at, the image of a hilly Riomaggiore village all by itself provides reason to visit this exhibit.
The image is like an intelligent supermodel – a perfect amalgamation of beauty and complexity. The backdrop of hills, stacked houses laced with balconies towering over city streets. The photograph literally reveals new life every time you look at it – a woman reading a newspaper on her terrace or a man’s tiny silhouette walking the streets. The Riomaggiore image is truly the gem of this exhibit.
The exhibit features black-and-white photos that are all silver gelatin processed, which means Antonioli produced them the classic way – in a darkroom with a mixture of silver salts and gelatin that coats the film. “It calms me down,” Antonioli said of working in the darkroom, “spending hours in there, just listening to my iPod and working.”
Antonioli took up photography as a freshman in high school who “needed to take an art class and didn’t know how to draw.” She soon found that in spite of its obligatory beginnings, photography had become a passion and an escape. “After my first day in the darkroom, seeing the photo in the tray, I was hooked,” she recalled.
“When in Rome” is currently on display in the University Union gallery, located in the Epicenter. Look for the woman reading the newspaper in Riomaggiore – you will probably end up finding something no one else did.