Looking at Alessandro Vicario's photographs, one feels inside the image, finding oneself in the slightly cold light coming through the still windows, perceiving the smells of the empty house and the usual silence of deserted rooms. Everything is motionless and suspended in a gesture of contemplation. But, as happens when we wake up in an unusual place, and the strangeness dissolves when we look around and focus on the surroundings, so with these images, after just a few moments, we recognize that those places and details, so wisely selected by Vicario, are part of everybody's life. Far from being just virtuous esthetical compositions, as they might appear to an inattentive gaze, these photographs let transpire the emotions these spaces are loaded with, and immortalize them, going beyond the merely, purposely autobiographical significance, to reach an emphatic charge that affects us all. These “emotional interiors” are not just spatial representations; they are rather fragments of a life narrated by often impalpable traces, by small things that discretely invite us to imagine the person who might have inhabited those places. And through them, Vicario makes us wish we had met that person ourselves. The “Design Department” of the Centro Arti Visive Pescheria opens its 2006 program with this beautiful photographic exhibition, which focuses in its own way on the topic of “home” and wishes to offer a moment for reflection to those working on home design. Because the images of inhabited places - that is, of design objects - offered by Vicario's interior photographs are quite different from the glossy, advertisement-like pictures we usually see in interior design and architectural magazines. Vicario introduces us to an emotional dimension, to a perception of space and objects that is not just physical and that, in my opinion, should always be at the root of every true project.