Mario Dondero

Altidona, a small town in the province of Fermo, nestled among the hills of the Marche region: here, in a room at the first floor of a mid-twentieth century building, is preserved the archive of Mario Dondero. It’s a common belief that this poet and photographer, this dreamy, homeless globetrotter did not care about the fate of his photographs. Once their information function was exhausted in the newspapers, he left them in newsrooms or at a friend’s house, already out to recount other slices of life, him not being prone to the sedentary work of image cataloging. Yet there is an archive, as rich as a sixty-years long career implies. A wealth of documents – thousands of slides, prints, negatives, contact sheets – that the photographic library of Altidona is patiently collecting, and of which a small anthology is offered in this book. Bright and beautiful images that tell of Italy and other countries, intellectuals, actors and especially the ordinary people, reflecting the sensitivity and poetry of a man who was an irreducible interpreter of the moral tension that marked the creative thought of the late twentieth century.