Under Your Feet
It is right here, beneath us. We trample it, ignore it — the earth that, over millennia, we cared for and now mistreat. Erosion, pollution, salinisation, climate change, abandoned countryside, wildfires and reckless choices have compromised Sicily's soil, year after year. A poor land generates poor people; it brings floods and droughts, and migration toward the cities. Carmelo Stompo spent six years, from 2017 to 2022, photographing his island through this lens: not the literary desert of dunes, but a slower desertification, of soil and of soul. He would set out for one place and lose himself in the immensity of his island-continent, bringing home not the images he sought but the ones that obsessed him more. The resulting book, La terra sotto i piedi, opens on a field of wheat — “the flesh of the earth,” writer Eletta Massimino calls it — and closes on a barefoot child walking through the wreckage with the lightness of someone who has not yet given up.
