Elsa Morante published the book “L’isola di Arturo” (Arturo’s Island) in 1957, a novel about childhood set on the small and wild island of Procida, located not far from the coastline of Naples, Italy.  This book is the starting point of the still ongoing Marta Giaccone’s project “Return to Arturo’s island”. Marta has discovered Procida trough the eyes of it’s young inhabitants. First with the book by Elsa Morante and later thanks to the teen agers that live on the island today.

After reading the novel, charmed by the main character Arturo, the boy-hero by the name of a star, and his magical relationship with Procida, Marta decided to visit the island. She wanted to find her own contemporary Arturos and she made friends with a group of teens. From that moment in 2015, Marta started to follow their everyday life, observing and living with them as much as possible, trying to describe a delicate and tumultuous period such as adolescence is.  She went back to Procida several times, in all the seasons of the year, with the kids as guides she discovered every corner of the island, from the famous to the hidden ones. In this project Marta is trying to see Procida with the eyes of a adolescent, that’s why she included in the work also some polaroids taken by the boys and girls portrayed in her images: “I asked them to bring me to their favorite spot and shoot a picture”.  

During this years of work in Procida she discovered a little spot of earth outside of time, she found the same atmosphere described in the book: a sort of enchantment Procida casts over its inhabitants who, very attached to their isle, live on a land faraway from everyone and everything, on a citrusy microcosm.

Source: yet-magazine.com/post/return-to-arturo-s-island 

More: martagiaccone.com

https://phmuseum.com/martagiaccone/story/ritorno-all-isola-di-arturo-return-to-arturo-s-island-854509eb33