There is an Italy that can’t be grasped head-on: it has to be observed perpendicularly — or rather, from above — when hierarchies flatten out and reality stops performing. Jacopo Di Cera meets it that way: suspending the camera over the world like a motionless metronome, and letting the life underneath compose the scene.

His zenital gaze isn’t chasing spectacle, but an ethics of the image: placing everyone on the same plane so as not to judge, so as to listen better. In this conversation — between sport and ritual, territory and community, shadows and desires — Italy emerges as a social portrait in the background: a country that reveals itself in the geometries of bodies, in the fractures of passion, and in that precise instant when aesthetics stops being surface and becomes investigation.

Exploring Italy from a new point of view

“In my ‘first’ life I was a marketing manager in an American multinational. In my ‘second’ I opened a communications agency. In my ‘third’ I’m an artist. But in all three, the theme of communication — and therefore aesthetics as well — has always stayed with me. I did that job for almost fifteen years… it’s natural that I still filter the world through that approach, today I put it at the service of an artistic inquiry, not a product.

I like shooting. I work with art, with photography, with digital art. From the very beginning of my artistic investigation, I’ve never liked doing photographic work, in the strictest sense of the term, to serve marketing or branding. What has always interested me was culture, art.

Over the last ten years I’ve told the story of Italy from a zenital point of view. I still remember the very first photograph perfectly: I was in Procida. My ex-wife was from Naples, so we’d often go to the sea together. One day I noticed a scene that, from the ground, seemed banal. At lunchtime, lots of boats would draw close, almost stick together, and they’d start passing around coffee, mozzarella, homemade things. From below you couldn’t really understand what was happening. Then, instinctively, I sent the drone straight up, perpendicular. From above, a world revealed itself.

You could see this floating community, a collective gesture with an involuntary choreography. I immediately thought it was an interesting perspective. There was an Italy I had never looked at like that. I called that work ‘Pass me the Parmigiana’, because that was exactly what it was: a table set on the water, but the table was an archipelago of hulls.

From there I understood I wanted to tell Italy from that point of view. And from there a real research into Italianness began. How we relate to one another, how we relate to the environment, to the territory. And when I say research I don’t mean only holidays, mountains, sea. I also mean traditions, stories, particular moments and sports events that are unique in their kind.

The hardest part was the study, the choosing. The search for the right place, the right event, the moment when there is a humanity that entrusts you with a story. And then you find traditions, rituals, communities, tensions. Not just beautiful images. But scenes that, seen from above, become narrative.”

Sport as a social portrait

“When I think about the role sport has had in my life — personally, culturally, artistically — I like to start from a simple distinction. Sport has always attracted me, but less as a personal competitive action. Probably because of aptitude, because of skill, I never developed something that would take me to compete at a high level. I’ve always practiced it, but as wellbeing, as private discipline. In my research, though, it has always been a very strong element.

If I look at my work from the last ten years, leaving aside the part of the Italian summer where you typically relax on a beach, I notice that sport is often at the center. But ‘Sport’ doesn’t mean only the canonical athletic gesture: it’s not only the endurance skier who sets off for the Marcialonga. Sport means skiing, sure, but above all it means exploring the relationship between human beings and territory — in that case, the mountain. It means investigating one’s own image, one’s own aesthetics, one’s own position within fragile balances. The mountain, seen this way, isn’t a backdrop: it’s an interlocutor.

And then there is a second level, just as powerful: the team, the human bond and the relationships that are created within and around the sporting system. There are those who play and those who support, those who cheer, those who belong. These are incredible elements, because they tell you a society in miniature. Just think of Piazza del Plebiscito full: I’ve seen crowds that, honestly, felt denser than other historical events. That tells us that, for that city, sport has an enormous role. We’ve always known it: in Naples, football is a mother tongue.

I’m an Inter fan and I worked for Inter on the twentieth scudetto — the second star, an important milestone. If you compare certain images of Piazza del Duomo with those of Piazza del Plebiscito, you realize they’re two different ways of being a crowd, two different ways of celebrating, two different cultures of participation. And that’s precisely why sport, for me, is an extraordinary territory for artistic inquiry. It’s a platform where relationships, balances and imbalances are created. Art swims in it: for aesthetic fascination, yes, but also because sport is a social litmus test. It gives you back a reflection of what a city, a people, an environment is today. It reflects a civilization. It doesn’t reflect only ‘sport’; it reflects the relationships between those who follow, those who practice, and the community around it. That perimeter is a portrait of the population itself.”

Sport as tradition and culture

“One work I always remember with passion is the Palio Marinaro dell’Argentario. It’s a tradition with an almost mythological origin: it comes from a past of raids and fear. Pirates would invade that area, and the people would take refuge in the caves with their boats. The faster you went, the better your chances of saving yourself. Out of that need, over time, a decades-old ritual was born: four contrade compete, and then the contrada that wins gets sunk. Basically an extreme sport — effort, ten laps of the course, a brutal race — and when the boat arrives, the contradaioli jump into the water and send it down. It’s a symbolic and physical gesture at once: victory and sacrifice, triumph and disappearance. Suggestive images — that suspended waiting, those figures still as in a natural theater. And it’s deeply felt: on August 15 everything stops for that Palio. From above, as if Charon were there ferrying and the damned souls, anxious, were pressing to climb into his boat, the scene becomes a sort of Barcolana: a mass of boats and intentions, an ordered swarming driven by the desire to belong. And here an element comes in that matters a lot to me: light. Shadows, reflections, engravings on the water. Details, yes — but also grammar.

Another example, always on the border between sport, landscape, and culture, is in Val di Pejo, if I remember correctly it happens in February. It’s a night uphill race: you go up with skins and then descend. From above, all the headlamp lights look like an abstract painting, a Kandinsky. It’s an image that sticks to you: a discipline that becomes a constellation.

In this sense, the view from above is aesthetic, yes — but for me aesthetics is a consequence. Photography, by the book, rests on one fundamental element: depth of field. The zenital shot, perpendicular to the scene, kills that depth: it puts everyone on the same plane. I don’t shoot from above because photos from above are beautiful — we already have too many and, probably, they’ve even bored us. I shoot from above so as not to pass judgment. So as not to decide who the protagonist is. If you’re in the foreground and your friend is in the background, the person who shoots has already decreed a hierarchy. In my research, I try to suspend it. I leave judgment to the viewer and instead try to make relationships emerge: between human and human, and between human and territory.”

The Importance of Sport

“In an era in which sport is often reduced to result, success, defeat, statistics, I consider myself lucky. My father was passionate about football. I’ve always been an Inter fan, and I follow it with real passion. I live in Rome and I have a nine-year-old son; I’m trying to pass that passion on to him, in the right way. But I have to make two different arguments. Because there is sport, and then there is true sport.

What we see in the sports papers, in the newspapers, very often is sport-business. It’s a system you can accept or not accept: how clubs stay afloat, budgets, controls, bans, ambiguities, suspicions, distortions. There’s a whole world you can even tell yourself you’re ignoring, but it exists.

And yet, inside that world, passion remains: the granddad who puts a scarf on you, the goals you carry with you as an emotional memory — Ronaldo the Phenomenon, Djorkaeff, Recoba. I think of Inter–Barcelona last year: for me it was epic, one of the most beautiful matches I’ve seen. It’s that kind of sport where you know there’s an enormous machine behind it, but you cling to the narrative, the story, the heart…

And then there’s the other sport: the human one. The sport of those who are born, grow, are shaped, become athletes — or even just find in sport a lexicon for living. A sport made of principles: fairness, health, healthy competition. A sport that teaches you to surpass limits. I think of Zanardi. In interviews he’s said it a thousand times: if you feel there’s a limit, try to go beyond it. One more minute. One more second. One more centimeter. Always try to move the line. And that, rhetoric aside, is a life lesson. Because sport is life. Sport teaches you motivation, sacrifice, goals, being with others.”

Shadows as an Expression of the Self

“Shadows are becoming an increasingly central territory of study, almost a new personal geography. The shadow is an ancient theme, layered, almost inevitable. If we think of Plato and the myth of the cave, the shadow is already the story of a distorted reality. Then there’s Jung, who says the shadow is something you carry inside and don’t know. In the end, the shadow has many interpretations — and I’m looking precisely for that space: where a black shape on the ground can become a biography.

I went much deeper into this theme thanks to Dynamo Camp, in Tuscany. It’s a reality where they make what I call ‘impossible’ experiences possible for seriously ill children or children with significant disabilities. It’s an almost magical place, a kind of oasis: an impossible vacation not only for them, but for the parents too. With Dynamo I worked on shadows, but photographing the parents one by one, not the children. I began carrying their shadow with me as a reflection, as a portrait of their soul.

Now I’d like to do something similar with Paralympic athletes: to tell their journey through shadows. Sport, in this case, becomes light outside the tunnel. It becomes the reason you find new motivations. For an athlete, the Olympics are already a goal that can occupy twenty years of life. For an athlete with a disability, often, they become even more: an existential goal. In my own way I want to tell it like this: with shadow portraits. For someone, the shadow could become an aspirational symbol. The body is in one position, but the shadow tells another. And then the question becomes: what does that position represent? A desire? A dream? A possible future? Something I would have wanted, something I will be able to do. An elsewhere that already begins here. There isn’t one single answer — and that’s the beauty of it.”

A continuous search

“I see a world that, in terms of values, is coming a bit undone. And precisely for this reason sport, when it’s clean, can be a moral lifebuoy: inclusion, fairness, respect, commitment, determination, integration. The problem is that sometimes it’s civilization itself that dirties sport. The example I always give is play-acting. Because in that there’s a synthesis of what shouldn’t enter sport: toxic cunning, the attempt to cheat, the idea of deceiving someone who is trying to trust you, and above all the education in trickery.

But sport can also teach society to evolve. Look at a football team today: two Italians play, the others come from everywhere. North, south, opposite poles. And society should look at that: because there you already have a model of possible coexistence. In this, over time, sport pushes — and forces — society to move. I see something healthy in it. But we have to keep that healthy thing healthy: those who play, those who organize, those who are inside the system.

I would like my work to help people see things from an honest point of view. I made my choice: I put my vision above. But the invitation I’m making is broader. I’d like to leave those who look at my work with the need to look at things from more than one point of view. To try to look at the same thing from another angle. Not to establish who is right or wrong, but to decide for yourself what to think. If this exercise then leads you to see shadows on snow, or a sport from above, that’s a consequence. It’s part of my language. But the principle — the reason I took a camera and put it above — is this: to change perspective. I chose mine. The invitation is that everyone finds their own.”