The City of Man
Work done in collaboration with the author Roberto Saviano.
The Coppola Village is the symbol of violated beauty. It was visioned as an area of leisure and perfect for tourism during the 70’s, but illegal building, speculation and presence of mafia have ruined one of the most beautiful stretches of the Domitian coast.
Translated from words written by Roberto Saviano:
There is still the road sign visible which indicates ‘Fontana Bleu Spa – City of Man – Heaven of Flowers’. It is the Coppola Resort Village in Castel Volturno along the Domitiana coast: an area where during the summer months thousands and thousands of people populate the coastline, although this does not appear in the photo shoots by Luigi Caterino.
The winter always highlights the exoskeleton of atrocious. The buildings on the sea where I spent my summers, concrete buildings where people docked the boat, a sea that has the colors of the ponds in autumn, a smoky gray sea, on which the waving waves carry debris, foam and dirt bubbles. Sometimes the sea is green, but not sea green like that of the bottle bottoms, a striped greenish, like mold, and there the beach was an abandoned mine of tools eaten by salt and wrapped in lime crusts.
I would have been digging for days, finding trowels, gloves, smashed boots, broken hoes, pickaxes, but I wasn’t there to play in the garbage, I was there because that was my sea.
I would have been digging for days, finding trowels, gloves, smashed boots, broken hoes, pickaxes, but I wasn’t there to play in the garbage, I was there because that was my sea.
Today, the beach is even more gloomy, because, in addition to junk, there are the remains of the towers exploded. In fact they are simple buildings on the sea where the NATO soldiers lived. People called that place “the towers of coppola village”.
Today, heaps of stone, plastic and metal are the sand of that piece of coast . There’s a picture of Luigi Caterino documenting the beach layers, like the design of a geological map. But it wasn’t only the sea to get us going in the city of man, there was the waterslide, it was the most popular amusement park in the area, it attracted all the boys of Campania and all hope to have a friend in the Coppola Village to play with water slides, to spend an afternoon in those plastic toys that now seem guts of a sea monster stranded on the coast.
Today, heaps of stone, plastic and metal are the sand of that piece of coast . There’s a picture of Luigi Caterino documenting the beach layers, like the design of a geological map. But it wasn’t only the sea to get us going in the city of man, there was the waterslide, it was the most popular amusement park in the area, it attracted all the boys of Campania and all hope to have a friend in the Coppola Village to play with water slides, to spend an afternoon in those plastic toys that now seem guts of a sea monster stranded on the coast.