Passaggi in India. Ieri e oggi, published by 5 Continents Editions in 2005, brings two eras of looking at the Indian landscape into deliberate correspondence. Antonio Martinelli’s contemporary photographs revisit monuments and views represented in the eighteenth-century aquatints of Thomas and William Daniell, whose historical images were published from 1794 onward. The book is therefore constructed not simply as a record of travel, but as a comparison between inherited representation and present observation.

Martinelli’s method depends on returning to the Daniells’ viewpoints. Architectural surfaces, surrounding landscapes, and the conditions of visibility become subjects of comparison: what persists, what has altered, and what a later image can reveal about the passage of time. The Daniells produced their views with the aid of a camera obscura; Martinelli’s camera enters the same visual coordinates while registering a different historical moment. The pairing makes the act of looking itself part of the subject.

This relationship between travel, visual records, and heritage preservation gives the book its particular force. It neither treats the older aquatints as picturesque illustrations nor presents the new photographs as isolated observations. Instead, the images are read across time, allowing change to appear through juxtaposition and making historical continuity inseparable from historical loss. For collectors, the book’s interest lies in this disciplined dialogue between archival material and contemporary photography, and in the clarity of its conceptual frame.

The Italian-language edition is an 80-page paperback from 5 Continents Editions. Its compact form suits a work whose argument is made through sequence and correspondence: each image gains meaning from the view beside it, and each return to a known site tests the authority of visual memory. Passaggi in India deserves attention as a focused photographic publication about how places are recorded, revisited, and preserved in images.