linenandlavender.net: For the Love of Italy

FOR THE LOVE OF ITALY

Rural Pleasures and Hotel Estates

by Marella Caracciolo

Photography: Oberto Gili

The pleasures of farm life, as most of the people featured in this book can tell you, are found in the details of everyday living: the smells, the tastes, the long walks in the woods; picking berries in summer, seeking mushrooms in winter; being aware of the sun and the moon at all time of day and night. Sitting in front of a crackling fire, sipping a glass of wine, and cooking chestnuts on the burning coals.

—excerpt, For the Love of Italy, Rural Pleasures and Hotel Estates

More images from Oberto Gili:

See more of Oberto Gili's work
(including a tour of his own studio and home)
in his book:

Home Sweet Home

Sumptuous and Bohemian Interiors

Gili's passion for the grand, bold and quirky granted him access to the inner sanctums of both high society and the bohemian demimonde. The selection includes numerous homes of French and Italian nobility, lords of the European and American creative class, and the photographer's own remarkable Piedmont farmhouse. –excerpt from the publisher

The images that I am now realizing in the studio... sixty nature-fantasy plates of fruits, flowers, vegetables, and the female form, mixed with tropical insects and butterflies — is a book on natural history for kids and grown-ups, Mon jardin, monde enchant, by André Grangeon (1948) that my mother gave me when I was five years old. I am using the gum bi-chromate printing method, a nineteenth-century technique for creating a painterly color image from a black-and-white negative. It is a combination of two media, camera and brush, and the joint work of the eyes and the hands. —Oberto Gili (excerpt from Home Sweet Home, Sumptuous and Bohemian Interiors)