Tatges eye is attentive, measured, both cultured and passionate. And the Italy that he photographs for us reveals the fascination and mystery of its magnificent and still so fragile equilibrium. One feels that the meaning of this Italian journey lies in the poetic conviction that the ancient, the modern, and the future coexist as a single, isolated, creative unit, and that the figurative storehouse of the past must be used as a legacy, material to reinvent, perpetually new. This is why the excerpts of cities and landscapes, extracted as if they were expressive words from a famous page to be consigned to the metaphysical enigma of estrangement, effectively summarize George Tatges poetic technique: an unconventional aesthete of borderlands, archaeologist of our recent failures, artiere (a term beloved by twentieth century metaphysics) of a reality both imagined and real.