Gardens of Predazzo

I've been seeing these vegetable gardens since the mid-'70s, since I was a child.
I spent all the summers of my childhood and adolescence here.
Vegetable gardens or gardens?
Vegetable gardens full of flowers or gardens full of zucchinis?
Hard to say.
I returned as a mature woman to spend new summers, and I started looking at them again, this time through the eyes of an architect.
Vegetable gardens at the foot of houses or houses in the vegetable gardens?
Buildings with roots or vegetable gardens with roofs?
Even harder to say.
To my eye, impeccable geometries, traces of an ancient history, clear as on the pages of a book.
But who cultivates these vegetable gardens always empty at any time of the day?
Finally, I decide to indulge the desire to photograph them, in search of an answer to these questions.

---

One cannot describe my emotion when one summer afternoon, while walking through the village with my camera, I come across the window of the bookstore and see a book titled: "THE GARDENS OF PREDAZZO A story, many stories" by Lucia Baldo.
I buy it immediately and read it in one breath.
A poetic narrative, light as the flight of a butterfly, breaks a spell.
And it floods "my gardens" with voices, footsteps, names, and new scents.
A viewpoint diametrically opposed to mine. But a sign that I am not mistaken. They have something special.
I begin to study the History of the Valley. An important history, as harsh and ruthless as it is. And I start to piece together, one by one, the history of this village.
The latest in chronological order. At the bottom of the plain, where the streams meet and the ground is marshy.
The history that even today "its gardens" tell us.