Bruno Barbey photographed Italy intensively from 1961 to 1964, attending less to monuments than to the people and social roles encountered in public life. The Italians gathers this early-1960s portrait of a country whose regional variety is held together by recurring figures: young men, nuns, priests, aristocrats, carabinieri, beggars, sex workers, and members of the Mafia. Their gestures, dress, and bearing make society visible as both daily experience and public theatre.

The book frames these subjects as a modern commedia dell’arte. That idea does not reduce them to types; rather, it draws attention to the interplay between individual presence and familiar roles. The cinematic comparison is especially apt: many figures recall the social worlds associated with Pasolini, Visconti, and Fellini, where ritual, class, religion, authority, and performance occupy the same street. Moving geographically from Rome to Milan, Barbey’s photographs map what the book describes as Italy’s emotional terrain.

Novelist and essayist Tahar Ben Jelloun contributes writing alongside Barbey’s photographs. The collaboration gives the volume a dual structure: observation through the camera is accompanied by a literary voice attentive to national character and contradiction. Instead of offering a comprehensive sociological account, the book builds its portrait through emblematic encounters—faces and situations that register the pressures, hierarchies, humour, and theatricality of Italian social life in the period.

Published by Harry N. Abrams in 2002, this first-edition hardcover comprises 120 pages in an approximately 29.9-centimetre square format. For collectors, its importance lies not in claims of scarcity but in the concentration of a sustained body of work made during a defined historical moment. It preserves Barbey’s extended study of early-1960s Italy in a single volume, while the dialogue with Ben Jelloun situates the photographs between photojournalism, artistic photography, and the literary portrait of a nation.