‘Notebook’, 100 shots by Giuseppe Di Piazza at the Museums of San Salvatore in Lauro

The characters protagonists of the portraits they go from Dario Fo to Umberto Eco, from Emma Marrone to Cristiana Capotondi, from Paolo Villaggio to Ornella Vanoni, from Emilio Isgrò to Roberto Andò, from Jay McInerney to Courtney Love, from Pietro Calabrese to Lucrezia Lante della Rovere, from Pietro Grasso to Nando dalla Chiesa. Portraits made between 1978 and 2025.

Giuseppe Di Piazza was born in Palermo in 1958. He began working as a journalist in 1979 and, nine years earlier, taking photographs. He worked as a reporter in Palermo covering the mafia for the newspaper L’Ora, then moved to Rome, where he worked first at Reporter and then for fifteen years at Messaggero. Since 2000 he has been in Milan where he directed the Agr agency, the monthly Max, the weekly Corriere della Sera, Sette, the multimedia system Corriere Innovazione and from 2017 to 2024 he was responsible for the Roman edition of Corriere della Sera.

Di Piazza’s photos have been published by many magazines and newspapers. And his portraits have already been the protagonists of several photography exhibitions: in 2011 the exhibition “I’m not from Po Valley”; in 2013, the exhibition “Italia Magazine“, with twenty-six photographic portraits of directors of Italian periodicals, produced by Leica Italia, exhibited at the Palazzo delle Stelline (Milan), at the Festival dei due Mondi (Spoleto) and at the Premio Ischia. In 2014 the exhibition “In the eyes of women” (twenty portraits of actresses, writers, TV presenters) was exhibited in Milan and Verona. In autumn 2015 the exhibition “Dissolution of the Cathedral” was exhibited in Milan, at the Still gallery.

Di Piazza has also published several novels in his career: with Bompiani he published “I quattro canti di Palermo” (2012) of which the American edition was released two years later by Other Press, with the title “The Four Corners of Palermo” (translation by Antony Shugaar), and “A very bad man” (2013). With HarperCollins Italia he published “Malanottata” (2018), “Il motivete della victim” (2019), “I cinque canti di Palermo” (2020), the essay “The art of not loving” (2021) and “O tu o lui” (2022).