The spark is almost accidental: for the first time, Maurizio Maggiani sees the scattered photographs of a lifetime gathered into a single digital archive. Portraits of men, women, children, and animals, but also countryside and factories, the Apennines and suburbs, train stations, parish churches, workers’ lunchboxes, flags and wars, snowless winters, solitude, and small communities.

Each shot evokes a story, a personal story that resonates within a larger one: the few lines intended to accompany the images thus become narratives in which past and present illuminate one another.

Almanacco dei viventi is a collection of “extraordinary details of life”: works of man and nature, archaic, folk, and contemporary myths. And life, above all life: these pages are, writes the author, “fifty years of history of my relationship with the reality of the living beings I have encountered.” And an invitation to the reader to join their gaze with that of the author, to add their own story to his.

From a delightfully oblique perspective, always at an angle, blending civic passion with poetry, Maurizio Maggiani transforms memory into an act of rebellion and reality into a secular “Canticle of the Creatures,” “here and now and everywhere,” to uphold the dignity of work, the kindness, and the fragility of our existence. This book is an exercise in attentiveness, because, as Simone Weil wrote, we must “learn to be attentive in order to be, later on, just.” A rendering of justice to life, to the living.

“Yes, there is life on this planet and everywhere the scent of this life, traces, footprints, and remnants; there is love for this life and relief in touching it and seeing that it is still here. And it never ceases to be enough.”