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	Indice dei Documenti		Loving Cattolica By Wilma Galluzzi To love Cattolica means to love the sea. And to love the sea means to love the water, foam, waves, shells, sand, seagulls, boats, fishermen, the port, the fish… and soaring above, the blue, grey, yellow, red, violet, black skies… All this and still more we find in Antonio Barbieri’s second photographic volume in which two things remain as constant “lied” motives: total love for his home town and for the sea. It is curious how these three words, morphologically similar (in Italian), such as “amare, madre, mare” (love, mother, sea), create not only a musical assonance, but also an emotional one. At least this is true for those who live in Cattolica and feel towards their town with its sea, as they would to a mother who has raised her son with love. But it is true also to those who only come to Cattolica on holiday and then return, always in the certainty of receiving a warm affectionate welcome a return in surety: the sea with its beauty, smells and those special flavours found in the traditional dishes. In Antonio Barbieri’s photographic recount the sea-shore prevails with skies that look painted and the views of the port sometimes taken in kaleidoscopic composition and at other times, analysed in poetic detail. The importance of Nature and especially that of the sea, prevails throughout the volume. Then the signs left by the hand of man rise to the surface: the boats, twin-hull boats and the deckchairs. The artfulness architectonic marks of human creation remain a discreet undertone in the iconographic narrations – something almost other than his “Cattolicamare”. The sea of the beach, the sea of the port. A Cattolica “all sea” and “all loved”. The other Cattolica, “all houses, streets, hotels, shops, restaurants, squares, gardens”, this also is to be loved for other reasons, stands behind - at the back of he who continues looking at the sea, enchanted. The volume, just like the tourist who comes to Cattolica, inevitably crosses over the border nearby Gabicce and Gradara and gives the visitor-reader a view that climbs up to the Medieval town once witness to the love of Paolo and Francesca, and from the Castle merlons, soars at a bound to the postcard images of Gabicce Monte, a romantic natural balcony overlooking the Adriatic which lets the eyes gaze out over the sea beyond Cesenatico, the green hills and on up to San Marino and Monte Carpegna. A section of the volume is then dedicated to a retrospective memorial: selections from the family album to those of the town’s photographic archives.. The youthful photos are beautiful, rigorously “posed” and taken by the author’s mother, a splendid siren among the sirens of the fountain in “ Piazza Primo Maggio”. And from the photographic albums of his mother, a magnificent woman as good-looking as a star of the cinema in the 50’s, the tale regresses in time, reducing the images like a telescope in reverse: from the photos of his mother as a child to those of old sailors who were in all probability friends of that Granny never known to her grandchild, because she died before he was born in the shipwreck of the fishing-boat Wilson in 1930. There are then “caressing” shots of a Cattolica in a far away time and faded memories of a community and world long past and which lives on only in those “tender” black and white photos. But also in those by now pale figures of a lost time, the protagonist is ever she: the sea. And in front of her in the present glare of a time re-found, she wakes bathed in the transparent light of dawn or goes to sleep under burning sunset skies or is rocked in the twilight of an incredible indigo – it is ever Cattolica: “città di mare, città da amare” that lady of the sea. by Wilma Galluzzi

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