MARTINA MAFFINI

La Bassa Parmense - the region between Po River and the old Roman street "Via Emilia" in Parma’s province, is a place difficult to codify, a place where sensory laziness, daughter of hasty and stereotyped images is defined as the place of nothingness. This place is the Plain crossed by the river, flat and far from the horizon, where the only variation is represented by riverbanks and highway overpasses, where time passing is measured in seasons and from far away you recognize villages from the shape of their bell tower.
“Bassa” (the low land) is not only a geographical place. It’s here where Cesare Zavattini, the Italian screenwriter and one of the first theorists of the Neorealist movement in Italian cinema, identified the deep and intimate poetry of simple and ordinary life.