Guido Guidi made five trips to Milan and its surrounding territory between 1990 and 1998, returning often enough that the city became a subject rather than a destination. Cinque viaggi collects the photographs made on those visits: 110 large-format works, many of them shown here for the first time. MACK published the book in 2021, in a bilingual English–Italian edition of 152 pages.

The route Guidi follows is a canal, traced from the outer suburbs toward the centre, and that line governs the book’s visual argument. Near the edges the pictures keep a vernacular, horizontal breadth — whole buildings, wide scenes, the untidy ground where countryside and city meet. Approaching the centre, the frame narrows and turns: façades, doorways, vertical cuts into the urban fabric. The shift is not stylistic restlessness but a way of registering how periphery and metropolis differ in kind.

People appear throughout, and they are not incidental. Young men gather on a bridge at the city’s edge, in a scene with something of Pasolini about it; passers-by work, shop, stop to smoke. Couples sit apart. Together they give the sprawl its loose citizenship — a population held together by proximity more than by anything else.

Guidi’s earlier books, Per Strada and Tra l’altro, looked at the rural and small-town landscapes of his native region. Here he turns to metropolitan Italy and to the social and economic changes that reshaped it across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Remnants of rural life and the traces of urban expansion lie mixed among the first signs of de-industrialisation.

Essays by Corrado Benigni, Antonello Frongia and Roberta Valtorta accompany the sequence, and the book appeared alongside an exhibition presented by Fondazione MIA at the Monastero di Astino in Bergamo. For a collector, the interest lies in Guidi’s sustained attention to a single place across eight years, and in a body of large-format work whose sequencing and bilingual presentation allow the photographs to be read as an argument about a city rather than a record of a journey.