The hope, the war, the next war, and something else

Gianluca Drago

Well-Known Member
I can only post 10 photos per post here and I'm not good at make selections.

There is this small town in the nearby mountains, called Asiago, you can search for it. It shared the same history of many other communities isolated in the mountains until at the beginning of the past century it had some hopes to become the destination of rich people during their holidays (the train station also nowadays is frescoed with advertisements from that time, with families skying in winters and hiking in lush coniferous forests in summers, I took some photos recently non without the usual bureaucratic annoyances to get a permit).

Then, World War I came along and erased all dreams of any possible development. Asiago was one of the most terrible theaters of that war here in Italy, and much of its population forcibly deported to distant Italian territories. After that came World War II. After the second war Asiago slowly finally became a tourist destination and was overrun by wild and misplaced constructions. Eventually, global warming arrived, and Asiago no longer got enough snow for skiing. Tourists are deserting it.

Its old houses, built long time before the postwar boom, are very simple houses: walls, usually not even painted, sheet metal roofs (rusted), a door, and simple windows outlined by slabs of local stone.

This is a photographic project I have been pursuing since last summer. And this is a taste of it. 10 photos are not enough to get a taste, sorry.



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Nice set! You really captured the abandoned town vibe. Even the shots in sunny conditions look a little desolate.
 
Nice set! You really captured the abandoned town vibe. Even the shots in sunny conditions look a little desolate.

Thank you @Gord Tomlin . I feel so sad looking at all those abandoned pieces of local history that I had to create a dedicated tone&chroma style to render the desolation I feel inside. The actual town is not such a ghost town as in my photos, but those traditional houses ("homes" would be a more proper name) are really as you see them in my photos, monuments to human stupidity.
 
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This was the shattered dream the people of Asiago had about their future life before the outbreak of World War I (this photo I took inside the old train station built in 1910, razed to the ground during World War I and faithfully rebuilt as a copy of the original in 1927). They had to wait until after World War II to live that dream, which is now fading due to climate change.

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I can only post 10 photos per post here and I'm not good at make selections.

There is this small town in the nearby mountains, called Asiago, you can search for it. It shared the same history of many other communities isolated in the mountains until at the beginning of the past century it had some hopes to become the destination of rich people during their holidays (the train station also nowadays is frescoed with advertisements from that time, with families skying in winters and hiking in lush coniferous forests in summers, I took some photos recently non without the usual bureaucratic annoyances to get a permit).

Then, World War I came along and erased all dreams of any possible development. Asiago was one of the most terrible theaters of that war here in Italy, and much of its population forcibly deported to distant Italian territories. After that came World War II. After the second war Asiago slowly finally became a tourist destination and was overrun by wild and misplaced constructions. Eventually, global warming arrived, and Asiago no longer got enough snow for skiing. Tourists are deserting it.

Its old houses, built long time before the postwar boom, are very simple houses: walls, usually not even painted, sheet metal roofs (rusted), a door, and simple windows outlined by slabs of local stone.

This is a photographic project I have been pursuing since last summer. And this is a taste of it. 10 photos are not enough to get a taste, sorry.



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As climate changes again, and again, as climate only is weather measured over a longer period, has the snow come back to Asiago these days? Interesting story and pictures.
 
As climate changes again, and again, as climate only is weather measured over a longer period, has the snow come back to Asiago these days? Interesting story and pictures.

When I was a child in Asiago in winter it snowed a lot. In the following decades snowfalls were less and less and in the last 10 years they are rare. The snow you see in my photos was in early January this year, a pleasant snowfall, but one that lasted no more than 3 hours and by the next day the snow had turned to water.
 
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