Dolce Via: Italy in the 1980s

Charles H. Traub's Dolce Via: Italy in the 1980s is a color street-photography survey made across Italy in the early 1980s, from Milan south to Marsala, and it stands as one of the sharper American outsider views of Italian public life from that decade.

Working with a panoramic Widelux camera, Traub photographed everyday encounters on piazzas, beaches, and sidewalks, drawn to the saturated color and theatrical self-presentation of Italians going about ordinary business. The book collects these images with a foreword by critic Max Kozloff and an introduction by poet Luigi Ballerini, and was published by Damiani in 2014 as a 112-page hardcover.

Traub, an American photographer and longtime chair of the MFA photography program at the School of Visual Arts in New York, has published widely on street photography and social documentary; Dolce Via extends the vernacular, color-driven approach of his earlier American work to a European setting.