Fondazione Cirulli is pleased to announce the opening of the photographic exhibition “Along the Blue Highways”. On display is a selection of thirty-eight black and white shots taken in the United States by the documentary filmmaker Francesco Conversano between 1999 and 2017, during the filming that led to the creation of various documentary films shot with Nene Grignaffini and produced by RAI CINEMA and for Rai Radiotelevisione Italiana/Rai 3.

In 2002, in the aftermath of the September 11th attack on the Twin Towers, the journey along the blue highways of Francesco Conversano and Nene Grignaffini in small-town America begins, continuing in 2003 during the United States' war in Iraq, and concluding in 2008, the year of Barack Obama's election.

In reality, this long American journey had already begun in 1999, with an initial exploration in the South, in New Orleans and Louisiana with the collaboration of writer Barry Gifford, discovering the locations of David Lynch's "Wild at Heart" (for which Gifford was the screenwriter). The American journey resumes in 2014, exploring the Midwest and the places that gave life to the mythology of Edgar Lee Masters' "Spoon River Anthology." In 2017, a new chapter of the journey retraces the memory of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, through the places that marked his life, from Hyannis Port, Massachusetts to the tragic conclusion in Dallas, Texas.

The essence of the journey through small-town America is to narrate the American way of life: stories of men, women, and places, far from the big cities, as writers like William Least Heat-Moon (with the eponymous "Blue Highways") and John Steinbeck did in his "Travels with Charley: In Search of America," when in 1960 he decided to embark on a journey with his dog Charlie to rediscover his country. During the film shoots, director Conversano used to take photographs, fragments of narratives complementary to the films, a sort of travel diary, a notebook, a means to bring together stories, faces, places, landscapes, notes, and suggestions about life in the provinces, away from the big cities.

The travel itineraries were often casual, inclined towards slowness and the unexpected, aimlessly following the blue highways, the roads colored in blue on Rand McNally maps.

Recently, the New York Times has reflected deeply on how the way of traveling has changed in the last fifty years: from the conception of travel invented by Jack Kerouac to today's practice, where GPS cancels and resets distances, both geographical and emotional vocabulary, thus missing out on the total experience of travel, which is discovery and inner growth.