Matera 1953

Federico Patellani's photographic record of the making of Alberto Lattuada's 1953 film La Lupa stands as a rare document of Matera before its Sassi districts became an emblem of Italian poverty and resilience.

In the wake of Carlo Levi's Christ Stopped at Eboli, Matera drew writers, photographers, and filmmakers eager to confront a place history seemed to have overlooked. Lattuada and Patellani arrived in 1953 to shoot La Lupa, a melodrama shot through with Neorealist observation, and Patellani turned his camera on location scouting, the mechanics of the shoot, and the faces and streets of the city. Left in a drawer for decades, the reportage appears here in full for the first time, with texts by Matteo Pavesi, Alberto Crespi, and Giovanna Calvenzi. Humboldt Books issued it in its Time Travel series: a 96-page softcover with French flaps and an inserted booklet, bilingual in Italian and English.

Patellani was among Italy's foremost photojournalists, known for the reportage Italia Magica and for work that repeatedly crossed into cinema, including a turn as assistant director on La Lupa itself. Lattuada, who co-founded Milan's Cineteca Italiana with Luigi Comencini in 1947, moved between architecture, cinema, and photography across more than forty films.