​Il Sangue Ricorda (The Blood Remembers)
Cape Ann, Massachusetts Italians came to Cape Ann to cut granite. What they left behind is mostly stone, but not only stone. There are amphorae in a seaside window. A colonnade of rough-cast columns facing open water. A ceramic tile on a picket fence that reads il giardino segreto. A sun god driving his horses across a weathered gate, half-hidden by hydrangeas. None of it belongs here, exactly. Mediterranean forms in New England light, on granite and salt air, under a colder sky than the one they were made for. They persist anyway. I photograph these places through their openings. Gates, oculi, gaps between columns, a diamond cut into a door. You look through one thing to see another. That is what inheritance feels like to me. My own roots are in the olive groves of Lazio, and I have never lived there. This is an ongoing project about what crosses an ocean, what gets built from memory, and what the body still recognizes generations later. — Michael Paul Caruso