2024-2025
Oil on canvas, historical stamps

Greetings from Munich is a series of paintings developed from my experience of artist residency in Munich, focusing on the Neuhausen-Nymphenburg area and its surroundings.

The project began from researching my great father past as Italian Military Internee during World War II events following the Italian Armistice. Finding myself staying for few days just in front of the house where one of the members of the Weiße Rose lived, I became increasingly interested in the way a familiar environment that becomes part of our personal memory can hide a dark history that often we ignore. Buildings, roads and landscapes that might initially appear ordinary begin to accumulate associations through repetition and time.

The paintings do not attempt to provide a comprehensive portrait of that area of Munich. Instead, they focus on fragments of the city: streets, buildings and views encountered during everyday life. These places are approached both as contemporary spaces and as sites layered with different histories. What is visible in the present coexists with what has disappeared, changed or remains hidden.

The title Greetings from Munich refers to the tradition of the postcard: an image selected to represent a place and sent from one location to another. However, rather than presenting familiar landmarks or idealised views of the city, the series concentrates on more personal and ordinary places. The paintings become a form of visual correspondence between the persons that had to live in these places and us.

The project is connected to my broader interest in time and memory. A city is never experienced as a fixed image. Our perception of it changes as we return to the same places, accumulate memories and become aware of the histories embedded within them. The paintings therefore move between observation and recollection, documenting both a physical environment and a particular period of time spent within it.

The choice of oil painting allows the images to develop slowly. Layers of paint are built up, altered and sometimes obscured, echoing the way places themselves accumulate traces of time. The material process becomes part of the work’s relationship with memory: images are constructed gradually, while earlier decisions remain partially visible beneath subsequent layers.

Although rooted in Munich, the project is ultimately concerned with a broader question: how do places become meaningful to us? How does a temporary or everyday environment become part of personal memory? And what remains of a place once we have left it?

Greetings from Munich is therefore both a record of a particular city and a reflection on the relationship between place, time and memory.