Giada Ripa’s The Thin Line began with a journey of roughly four thousand kilometres, from Italy’s northern border to its southern regions, following a gas pipeline that is almost invisible from the surface. The route passes under motorways and country roads and through forests, parks, rivers and areas described as the peninsula’s natural oases. What Ripa photographs is rarely the installation itself; it is the seam where the network meets ordinary life.

The book moves slowly on purpose. Ripa sets travel notes drawn onto maps beside archive images, working at a register between historical research and close, unemphatic anthropological observation. For much of the sequence she withholds the pipeline altogether, showing only fragments of maps and modest above-ground markers; the mechanism is disclosed late, in a single perspective view that suddenly makes the buried system legible. That delay carries the argument: a network reshapes a landscape long before anyone sees it.

An accompanying text comes from Pippo Ciorra, an architect and critic who has written extensively on cities, museums and contemporary Italian architecture. His contribution places the photographs inside a longer discussion about how Italian territory is planned and inhabited. Ripa studied at the International Center of Photography in New York and worked as a correspondent before turning to independent projects; her earlier books include Displacement and The Yokohama Project 1867–2016. She has been nominated twice for the Prix Pictet, once for The Invisible Pipeline and again for this body of work.

5 Continents Editions published The Thin Line in 2020 as a hardback of 174 pages, in English and Italian, at 19 by 26 centimetres. For collectors drawn to photographic treatments of infrastructure, land use and the ethics of engineering that reorganises both, it is a considered and unusually structured example — one that keeps the reader moving between the map, the archive and the ground.