‘Salvatore Mancini, besides con-tributing to numerous periodicals, has also staged several personal and joint exhibitions. For over a decade he has been con-sidered one of America’s leading photographers. Mancini is an artist with a strong interest in ancient cultures, whe-ther these be archaeological (the world as a whole), purely ethno-graphical (popular traditions of southern Latium) or anthropolo-gical (alien cultures). Part of this interest has focused on a pre-historic and historic civilization of hunters and collectors, but al-so farmers, capable of expres-sing on stone (by cutting and fil-ling with colours) a world of ima-ges much more complex than might have been imagined, be-hind which it is possible to ma-ke out richness of expression, stylistic maturity, fantastic imagination and an exceptional ani-mist religiousness. The Meeting exhibition presents 62 photos of rock paintings and petroglyphs created over a pe-riod of 3,000 to 4,000 years in the south-west of the United States. Besides their high artistic con-tent, these pictures offer a poe-tic interpretation of the rich, va-ried and complex figurative repertoire of the Navajo Indians which underlies a strong cultu-ral evolution and spiritual rich-ness. The techniques adopted by these populations go from the strictly figurative to others in which schematisation domi-nates without though ever lo-sing the legibility of the subjects portrayed. The works of Manci-ni, thanks to the clearness and essentiality of the images, ma-nage to evoke a far and distant world, to mediate between it and us to the extent that it is not ea-sy to separate the emotions kindled by the rock figures of the Indians of the south-west from those provoked by the refined and stirring art of the photogra-pher.’