Venice has been photographed more than almost any city, yet Marina Vitaglione approaches it as a place already partly underwater. The images in Solastalgia were made from film submerged in Adriatic seawater, so the deterioration of the medium and the erosion of the city cannot be separated in the looking. Rising tides, subsidence and pollution are the book’s subject; they are also, in a sense, its process.

The sequencing works as photo/text docufiction. A narrative voice — the lagoon city’s own — describes a disappearance it cannot stop, and the accompanying frames hover between evidence and invention. Vitaglione’s interest lies not in spectacular ruin but in the ordinary continuance of a place being altered from beneath; fiction gives the photographs room to grieve without turning the book into a survey of damage.

Overlapse published the volume in 2017: a first-edition hardcover of 84 pages, 24 by 17 cm in portrait. Roberta Donatini’s design carries the concept into the object. The book is section-sewn and quarter-bound, with a booklet insert holding an Italian translation, and the restraint of that making belongs to the reading — it does not announce its subject so much as let it show at the edges.

For collectors, the appeal is the fit between means and matter. Solastalgia is a first edition that has since gone out of print, and it belongs to a small group of books whose physical production is inseparable from their argument: film damaged by the sea is used to describe the sea’s damage. The decision is structural rather than symbolic, which is why the book holds up as more than a record of an environmental moment.

Vitaglione’s Venice is not a postcard in decline but a city speaking in its own compromised voice, and that is the book’s lasting claim on a shelf.