In her novel, Italian writer Dolores Prato wrote of the village where she grew up, "I did not belong to Treja, Treja belonged to me": in it, I've found out the same feeling that binds me to my home. The title of my project is a tribute to Prato and her work "Giù la piazza non c'è nessuno".

I grew up - and lived until my early twenties - in a small town in the central Apennines: a medieval village with fewer than 300 inhabitants that today has no schools or gathering places except for two bars and a small playground, just as there are fewer and fewer young people and especially fewer children. Like so many other small Italian villages, it has been in the process of abandonment for decades: there has been a community and vibrancy that I knew through my parents' memories, but never through my own eyes.

The sense of loneliness, of abandonment, has always passed through me in the years I lived there: life would return when summer returned, with its vacationers and their cars clogging the narrow streets; then they would all disappear again and the village would become once again one of a few, more old people than children.