A Lion of a Wednesday
Friendship, wonder, that warmth inside. And heat straight out of hell. Piazza Duomo in Parma doesn’t do soft angles. A few days ago I was there with a friend passing through town, Annalisa, who’d called to say hello. We were standing on the church square, right in front of the two big marble lions that guard the main portal. We got talking about how film photography still somehow beats digital, hands down, and about visual weight, about lines, about that odd habit we have of squeezing the whole world into a rectangle. It took one glance. Just enough time to pull out the phone and shoot. Neither of us had a real camera on us. There was only room for instinct. What came out of it is a stack of straight lines: pale stone at the bottom, a tight row of arches in the middle, and above it all this huge slab of brick, the bishop’s old seminary, flattened almost two-dimensional under the noon sun. That light was merciless enough to turn even the roofline deco...
