Bella Italia

2016

Original photographs by Kristie Atwood printed on 100% cotton paper. Japanese side stitch binding.

​

Bella Italia was made as a gift for a friend, Steffanie. She visited us In Orvieto in 2015 and we found a lot of freedom together. The book is a compilation of my photographs during her visit. It was rather difficult to discover the best structure and how to paginate the book, as well as being quite time consuming to edit and arrange the photos to my liking.  I finally decided on a Japanese side stitch and attached the photos back to back. It took over a year to complete and was finished for her 50th birthday.

One of our most lovely days together is documented in the book. We went down to the Etruscan Necropolis to draw and all the trees were heavy with fruit. This area in Umbria is so fecund; you’ll be walking through a forest that seems to have gone wild again and there will be a pear tree with fruit, then a persimmon, a fig, cherries etc. Amazing! So in the necropolis we began to pick the fruit. It was beginning to grow over-ripe under the sun and there was so much of it. We couldn’t waste it. We ate it right off the trees and then collected more to take back to our apartment, filling our bags with apricots and cherries. Steffanie made a delicious cobbler that night. Oh, and we did draw and inspected the dirt that some archeology students dug up.