The Sozzani Foundation presents two exhibitions by the photographer Paolo Di Paolo , curated by Silvia Di Paolo, with the patronage of the Pier Paolo Pasolini Study Center and the collaboration of Bulgari.

The first exhibition, “ LA LUNGA DI SABBIA ” with photographs by Paolo Di Paolo and texts by Pier Paolo Pasolini : one hundred and one images, many of which unpublished, videos and documents.

In 1959 Paolo Di Paolo is 34 years old and has been photographing for five years for "Il Mondo" directed by Mario Pannunzio, Pier Paolo Pasolini is a promising 37-year-old writer, he published The best of youth, Ragazzi di vita and Una vita violenta, è non è still director. In Italy, the economic miracle has just begun. Italian families in the newspapers tend to offer a microcosm of mythical characters, as an alternative to the dullness and fears of war, emigration, poverty to be left behind.

Arturo Tofanelli, director of the monthly “Successo” and of the weekly “Tempo”, entrusts the two authors, who do not know each other, with the report on the Italian summer holidays. The writer and the photographer set off together from Ventimiglia, with the project of traveling the coasts of Italy to the south and climbing them up to Trieste. But they have different views. “Pasolini was looking for a lost world, of literary ghosts, an Italy that no longer existed - recalls Di Paolo - I was looking for an Italy that looked to the future. I also conceived the title The long sandy road which wanted to indicate the tiring road traveled by the Italians to reach well-being and holidays. " A complex, delicate partnership is born, which will unite them only for the first part of the journey, but which will then be consolidated in mutual respect and trust.

The long sand road, the extraordinary story in pictures by Paolo Di Paolo accompanied by the texts by Pier Paolo Pasolini, will be published by "Successo" in three episodes (4 July, 14 August and 5 September 1959) and will tell the story of Italians on vacation, from Tyrrhenian to the Adriatic; from Ventimiglia to Ostia; from Torvaianica to Sicily; from Santa Maria di Leuca to Trieste. Pasolini writes: “The mountains of Versilia ... laughing or gloomy? Here is one thing that can never be understood. A little crazy, in shape, and always inked with colors from the end of the world, with those pinks, those dry flashes of marble that leak out as if by chance. But so sweet, mythical. Here is the Cinquale beach. (...) "