Per Strada gathers Guido Guidi’s photographs made between 1980 and 1994 along the Via Emilia, the ancient road that runs from Milan toward the Adriatic and passes near his home in Cesena. Rather than treating the route as a sequence of celebrated Italian destinations, Guidi looks to the spaces between them: the edges of Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, Bologna, Forlì, and Rimini, where residential, agricultural, industrial, and commercial uses accumulate without resolving into a single image of place.

Working with an 8 x 10 inch camera, Guidi attends to the ordinary landscape as both subject and method. Entrances, roadside structures, signs, fields, and fragments of development become evidence of the vernacular—the lived environment that conventional ideas of Italy can easily overlook. The photographs do not simplify the territory into either picturesque countryside or anonymous suburbia. Instead, they register its layered, unsettled character: a palimpsest formed by centuries of use and by the continuing pressure of movement, construction, and commerce.

Published by MACK in 2018, Per Strada is organised as a three-volume book with a bilingual booklet containing a conversation with Guidi, bringing a sustained body of work into an extended editorial form. The project has roots in Guidi’s collaboration with Luigi Ghirri on Due fotografi per il Teatro Bonci and in the 1986 group exhibition Esplorazioni sulla Via Emilia, but this publication allows the road to be considered through the continuity of Guidi’s own photographic attention. Its 464 pages reward slow reading: not a tour of landmarks, but a patient account of how a region discloses itself in ordinary, intermediate spaces. For collectors, the book is significant as a substantial statement of Guidi’s long engagement with rural and suburban Italy, and as a carefully structured record of a landscape understood through observation rather than spectacle.