Living by Volcanos, 2025
Amid craters, fumaroles, and rocky landscapes, Bertrand Desprez offers a wandering journey across the slopes of Italy’s three major active volcanoes: Stromboli, Vesuvius, and Etna. In the surrounding towns and villages, he observes everyday life unfolding on unstable ground.
In places bordered by a calm, blue sea, residents live with striking contrasts: the green of the vegetation against the black of the mountainsides, fire and water, the peaks piercing a flat horizon, the streets of Pompeii and Herculaneum, where memories of destruction and death still linger, now animated by tourism.
Living at the foot of a volcano profoundly shapes identity and culture: this presence appears in street art, in the religious paintings adorning churches, and sometimes even on people’s skin, as seen in certain tattoos.
This intimate coexistence reveals the dual nature of an environment that is both dangerous, shaped by fire and deeply inspiring.
—
—
