This photograph was one of 250,000 negatives, prints and slides, crammed into trunks in Paolo Di Paolo’s cellar, discovered by his daughter twenty years ago. It was the beginning of an incredible journey for the former Il Mondo photographer’s archive of images of postwar Italy: 250 of his pictures ended up in Gucci’s collection after creative director Alessandro Michele came across them in a bookstore. Those photographs are now going on show at Rome’s Maxxi gallery; they include portraits of Italy’s glitterati and intellectual figures, street scenes and documents of a society in a state of transition.
