"Mundus alter Venetia dicta est": this is how Petrarca defines the lagoon city, a favorite subject of Alessandra Chemollo's lens for over twenty years. His works, collected in this precious photographic book, are able to make the "stones" speak, opening our eyes to the play of reflections of the water and the changing sky, in a place where borders seem to no longer exist. This is how Venice turns into an alter mundus, visited and told over the centuries by famous travelers, such as Henry James, Thomas Mann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, up to Ian McEwan and Christopher Bollen. Another world, in which it is necessary to move with caution, avoiding being captured by an image that seems familiar to us only because we secretly hope it will help us sustain the power of this foreign city. Images in a tight narrative sequence, which do not want to be commented on, which do not seek explanations, but which connect to other worlds, thanks to the extraordinary writing of Franco Rella capable of moving in the interstices between one and the other. «The images that Alessandra Chemollo traced and put into a plot, a story - observes Rella - are born from the real attempt to go in search of another world, alter mundus. To do this he has not only followed the profiles of the stupendous buildings, monuments and houses that he presents to us; he not only chased the water in which the columns sink or reflect, but he tried to empty Venice of everything that today constitutes it but above all the mask. His Venice has no pigeons, no seagulls, no tourists. We cannot consider such the figures that move tiny, almost an ornamental piece of furniture, in a photograph of the square in front of the Procuratie Nuove».