MASKS EUROPEAN PROJECT

15 October 2026

I'm holding a guide to Molfetta that I laid out myself: I recognise the photos, the ten itineraries and, on the last pages, the names. Hotels, restaurants, tour guides from my town, people I know by name, and I even know where they have their morning coffee. This is VisitMolfetta, the tourism promotion project I built for Molfetta together with them.

From "there's nothing here" to ten itineraries

It all began with a line I heard at every meeting with the local tourism sector: "Why would a tourist stop here? There's nothing." The people saying it were the very ones who made a living from tourists.

I thought the opposite. Every town has its genius loci, it's just that the people who live there walk past it every morning and no longer see it. So I looked at Molfetta as if I hadn't been born there: the harbour, the Cathedral on the sea, the Easter processions, the September feast, the shipyards, the summer nights.

Out of that supposed nothing came ten itineraries, each with its own name and soul. I turned them into three tools: a pocket guide in Italian, English and German, a multilingual web portal, www.visitmolfetta.it, and a daily story on social media.

A guide nobody could pay for alone

My job, which others call tourism and cultural marketing, was to bring those two worlds to the same table. The Municipality put in a tiny share of the funding (no comment) and access to trade fairs inside the Apulia Region stand. The private businesses provided most of the budget and, above all, their faces: if a tourist came to Molfetta, the game would be played in their rooms and at their tables.

Winning them over one at a time

There was no decisive meeting. The sceptics weren't one or two to convince: they were all of them. I took them on one by one, always facing the same objection.

I'll confess something. Harder than the design, the copy and the translations was holding together people who, the day before, had been competing on the same street. A public-private network isn't signed. It's built one phone call at a time, and with every call you risk losing it.

Tourists buy a town, not a hotel

At a fair like Berlin, nobody stops for a single restaurant in a town they've never heard of. They stop for a destination. A single business can't offer one. A tourism sector that shows up united can.

That year, the tourism and cultural promotion project VisitMolfetta toured the most important national and international travel trade fairs: from the BIT in Milan to the ITB in Berlin and TTG in Rimini.

23 September 2026

Four hours aboard the fishing boats for the sea procession of Molfetta, feast of Maria SS dei Martiri, patron saint of the town.

The sacred, the profane and a sign read backwards.

What am I doing here. Inside the sea procession of Molfetta

S"What am I doing here?" is a question I have asked myself many times, in my working life and outside it. It comes when you feel out of place, when your being somewhere has no obvious reason. And yet the urge to explore new ground always pushes me to try, because curiosity is an incurable disease.

Luckily, I would add.I had been invited by Mimmo Facchini, a friend and a former boat owner, for two reasons that hold together, because he thinks I am a capable photographer and because this year the draw had gone to his cousin's fishing boat, the Nuovo Saturno, given that in Molfetta who carries the statue out to sea is decided neither by money nor by family name but by a lottery, and when your turn comes it rarely comes again.

He asked me aboard for the sea procession of 8 September, the feast of Maria Santissima dei Martiri, four hours from four in the afternoon until eight in the evening with no way of getting off, and I accepted late and rather badly, out of curiosity more than courage.

The comfortable side of the barrier

I have worked on patron saint rites since 2006, with Settimana Santa in Puglia and then with Patroni di Puglia, and for years I have been building stories about popular devotion while always standing on the spectator's side, with the good spot, the light worked out in advance and the freedom to leave whenever I felt like it. I found myself surrounded by people I did not know, faces I had never seen before, and in Molfetta that does not happen, because I do not live in a big city and here you know everyone at least by sight. Not them. Not one.

On board that freedom does not exist, and this is what changes everything, because for the first two hours I did nothing but trip over everything and bang my head on hatches built for men shorter than me, while my only thought was not to end up in the water, which is to say that anthropology, seen from the inside, is done mostly with your knees.

What you cannot see from the shore

Then at some point I stopped defending myself and I looked, and there was an old man beating a bass drum standing on planks that moved, and a man diving in fully dressed while the cathedral slid past behind him, and a friar talking to the sailors and gesturing towards the harbour, and wedged between two boards of the deck a pale blue card with Ave Maria printed on it, fallen and trodden on, which nobody all afternoon could be bothered to pick up. People sang, danced and prayed.

And this is what you cannot grasp from the shore, because here the sacred and the profane do not take turns but live together in the same square metre of deck and in the same minute, so much so that on that afternoon Maria Santissima dei Martiri was travelling on the deck of a boat named after a Roman god, and nobody had noticed, myself first of all.

At eight I came down wrecked, with the feeling that I had spent fifteen years photographing the side the feast shows to outsiders.

photo by Gaetano Armenio

4 March 2026

1996-2026. Thirty years of music, identity and shared passion.

There's one photograph in the exhibition that stopped me more than the others. A girl with her eyes closed, the clarinet resting against her forehead. No audience, no procession, no uniform in the foreground. Just concentration.

I built and shot that photo myself. I had many musicians in front of me, and I chose her. For her face, for the delicacy of the expression, but above all because she captures the environment I found when I joined the Associazione Musicale Santa Cecilia: surprisingly young. In that moment I also understood how to tell these thirty years. Not with a sequence of photographs, but with a story.

Designing a cultural event: turning memory into narrative

For me, designing cultural events is exactly this: turning images, memory and people into a story that can speak to a community. It's the work I've done for over forty-five years, across graphic design, publishing, photography and visual identity. And it's probably also the reason I was asked to coordinate this photographic exhibition.

The "best of youth" is not a slogan. They are the boys and girls who come to the association every day. The ones who study, rehearse, get it wrong, try again. The ones who choose to give their time to something that isn't only performance, but belonging.

On 22 April 1996, fifteen people decided Molfetta deserved a musical voice of its own. Since then that choice has become a path, a school, a discipline, a community. When I started working on the exhibition I understood right away that celebrating an anniversary wasn't enough. I had to give back the meaning of what this band represents for the city. So the exhibition runs through thirty years like a family album: from the founders to today's young players, from rehearsals to processions, from patron saint feasts to summer evenings.

A confession

While selecting the images, I felt a touch of envy. Not for the thirty years of history. For that quiet determination I see in their eyes. For the ability to stand inside a tradition without carrying it as a weight, but as a privilege.

A band that grows from below

The Banda Santa Cecilia is not only the soundtrack of Holy Week, the patron saint feast or Christmas among the alleys. It's a place of growth. A school of collective responsibility. A training ground in listening to one another.

The exhibition stays at the Sala dei Templari, in Molfetta, until 9 April 2026. That girl with the clarinet is there, among the others. Her eyes still closed.

27 March 2026

Holy Week in Apulia: from the Gargano to the Salento, how I have built up a network of twenty-two municipalities since 2008 to jointly promote the Easter celebrations.

"Who are you?"

When a question at a trade fair is worth more than a business plan At the Apulia Region’s stand during a trade fair, a manager came up to me. She looked at me, somewhat puzzled: “Who are you?” A fair question. Standing before her was someone with no official role, no party membership, and no regional office to back them up. However, he had managed to persuade twenty-two municipalities in Apulia to pay a registration fee for a joint project to promote Holy Week rituals. 

I thought about it for a moment. Then I smiled.

From ‘just Molfetta’ to the whole of Apulia

From the BIT in Milan to the Molfetta information point, and in the aisles of trade fairs, the question was always the same: "It's lovely… but is it just Molfetta? Isn't there anything else in Apulia?" Those who had experienced the processions in the dark, the drums, and the silence that weighs like a stone, wanted more. And that ‘more’ did exist. From the Gargano to Salento, every town had its own Easter traditions, its own processions, and its own communities that came together every year. But no one told their stories together. Each village went its own way, like islands in an uncharted archipelago.

In 2008, I started making phone calls.

Initial sign-ups: ten local councils. Then word of mouth and meetings. Ten became twenty-two. A regional network has been established, organised into themed routes: Gargano and Daunia, Imperial Apulia, Bari and the Trulli Coast, Salento, and Magna Graecia. Councillor Guglielmo Minervini puts me in touch with Massimo Ostillio, the councillor for tourism. They like the idea. The project is taking on a regional dimension.

The work that goes unseen

Behind every procession lies the work of skilled craftsmen. Research, analysis and a set of quality standards to ensure a warm welcome and basic services. Then there are the tools: a bilingual guide, a website, a presence at trade fairs, and a stand at Bari Airport to engage with arriving and departing passengers. The aim was clear: to spread tourism throughout the year. To use Holy Week in Apulia as a catalyst for travel, rather than the usual summer beach season. Roots instead of a parasol. An opportunity to discover the region’s beauty through its landscapes, art and food and wine.

The best ideas don’t come from the office

They come from listening to tourists and travellers who ask questions and seek ‘authenticity’. That question – "But only Molfetta?" – was already the answer. We just had to take it seriously. And when a manager asks you, "Who are you, anyway?", perhaps that’s a sign that the invisible work has started to show itself.