Portrait of a journey in motion blur

…or of photography as a way to pause time, or at least pretend to.

There’s a sort of psychological experiment in taking the same train route for 26 years from Milan to Barletta: seven hours approximately, the usual delay plus a questionable sandwich that tastes like nostalgia.

I know the stops by heart. I know where the internet connection dies (everywhere), I know where the landscape starts to flatten and I know where my existential crisis peaks (usually somewhere around Bologna).

On the trip back home for the Easter holidays I brought my camera as I always do, not to document the view but to try and make some sense of it. What came out was a photo essay made up of fast-moving foregrounds – blurry poles, fences, unidentified things – and perfectly still backgrounds. A metaphor for what time feels like when you’re getting adult: everything rushing past while the important things sit in the distance, unmoved.

Photography is cheaper than therapy and has fewer side effects – unless you count mild shoulder pain and unsolicited requests from strangers. Still, pointing my lens at this blur gave me a strange sense of control, like maybe if I could freeze a fraction of it, I could slow the whole thing down.

Spoiler: I could not.

But the exercise was cathartic, not because it answered anything, but because it made space for the questions: How long have I really been gone? How much has changed? How much have I changed, besides the cholesterol?

Arriving in Barletta after almost nine hours (the aforementioned delay…) of reflection is always jarring. The light is different, the air is slower. And my parents, who’ve been waiting, loving, and stubbornly aging in my absence, are somehow both exactly the same and entirely transformed.

There’s no app or notification that tells you when your parents start walking slower, you only notice on visits like this, visits you keep telling yourself you’ll do more often, once life “slows down.”

Spoiler: it won’t.

Barletta, with its gentle chaos, slower pace and its infinite variations of “Did you eat?” is the kind of place that reminds you of what doesn’t change. It’s frustrating, it’s comforting: it’s home.

Here’s the moral to the story: Milan runs forward, Barletta waits.

And me? Somewhere in between, taking blurry photos from train windows, hoping that’ll buy me a few more minutes of stillness and peace of mind.