Paolo Cenciarelli - Vangelo MMXVIII

Rome: the center and the suburbs, lounges and highways, tattoo studios and recording rooms. This is the background of photographer Paolo Cenciarelli who, between 1998 and 2015, told the story of an epochal change, the beginning of the Roman Underground in a new millennium made of music, concerts, tattoos and an ever-present counterculture underworld.

What is counterculture? “It’s what will become fashion after ten years”, someone once said. This is the spirit that accompanies Vangelo, the most exhaustive and irreverent collection of photographs that take as their protagonist the eternal city, holy and sinful, always the same and always different, populated by the noble poor, the rich drug dealers, decadent scenarios and abandoned treasures, suburbs without name and ruins of an old and never forgotten opulence.

Just from its title, it’s clear that Vangelo is provocative photographic collection, deliberately invoking the “sacred part” of everyday Rome. Everything you see has happened under the windows of the Church, between Popes and conspirators, priests and nuns, buses of the faithful and tattooed rebels, rosaries, prayers and vandals with crosses on their necks.