A field of faces, a crowd of spectators taken by surprise at the audacity of a young photographer in a Puglia village as it celebrates the festival of its patron saint. During the fanfare, Cecilia Mangini, dressed in jeans and a sport coat with a Superikonta 6x6 camera around her neck, leaps onto the steps of a bandstand, right behind the maestro as he conducts Rossini’s most beautiful overture. The spellbound faces of the citizens of Rutigliano showing their astonishment at what is unfolding before their eyes. Click! A moment that lasted 55 years, bringing us back to a landscape of faces, of men dressed in their Sunday best at a concert in the village square. They are all men, of all ages. There are no women in the photo, except for a few half-hidden faces. One has a child with her.

In that public space, we see a thousand faces reflected back at us: a thousand stories, a thousand unpredictable journeys caught for eternity by a click of Cecilia’s shutter. A street photographer, the only woman ready to act, enchant and surprise the public at this decisive moment, a fraction of a second that lasts forever.


This is the exploration of a famous photograph. Cecilia loved to open her retrospectives with Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia and images of a field of faces, all tied to the real and lovely faces in the films made by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Paolo Pisanelli
Cinéaste et collaborateur de Cecilia Mangini