Riding with the Poets

There’s a kind of project you simply can’t make “quickly”. It takes time, returns, notes taken when nothing particularly dramatic is happening. It takes looking, waiting, and looking again.

That’s why I’m genuinely happy to see Riding with the Poets by Igort (Igor Tuveri) released by Einaudi, in bookstores from April 7, 2026. Only in italian, for now.

Igort has said it took years of travel, study, and drawing to reconstruct and retrace the routes that shaped the poetic search of Matsuo Bashō and the visual world of Katsushika Hokusai. The idea that stays with me is simple and rare: to go to the places in order to make room for contemplation.

Not to “collect” places, but to let them settle. Not to chase the perfect scene, but to allow the landscape to become a way of thinking.

Being there, without trying to take it all

Over the years I’ve had the immense luck of being alongside Igor in Japan during some of those trips. For me it was a privilege—not only for the itinerary itself, but for the pace it taught.

Traveling with someone who pays attention the way he does changes your own rhythm. Priorities shift: when to stop, when to keep walking, when to stay one minute longer in front of a view that—if you keep looking—stops being “background” and becomes presence.

It’s a kind of listening we often lose in big cities. And it’s also, in a way, a lesson that always comes back in photography: not to extract an image from a place, but to give yourself the time to enter it.

A travel notebook, a memory album

From how I imagine it (and from how Igor has spoken about it), this book sits somewhere between a travel notebook and a memory album: a journey where the past is always present, and everyday wonders don’t ask to be over-explained.

I haven’t had the chance to leaf through the final copy yet, but I already know it will feel like returning to that world—through Igor’s perspective, and through his quiet discipline of looking.