UN QUARTO DI MIGLIO D'AMERICA

A QUARTER MILE OF AMERICA

For one weekend, a small America appears in Italy’s Po Valley.

At an airstrip in Rivanazzano, American flags fly above motorhomes, spectators wear cowboy hats, and hand-built dragsters line up against the hills of northern Italy. People arrive with their cars, their families and the objects that will turn a stretch of asphalt into a place of their own.

Building this America takes months of devotion and a certain disregard for common sense. Nights disappear in garages. Savings become engine parts. Machines are dismantled and rebuilt, then trusted with someone’s body. All for four hundred and two metres — a few seconds that somehow justify doing it all again.

I became interested in this temporary geography: how an idea of somewhere else takes shape through clothes, machines, gestures and shared rituals. Between races, that America becomes domestic. Children move through the paddock, people gather around tables, engines are repaired, and the motorhomes light up after dark.

The photographs move between the spectacle and the everyday life that sustains it. A flag, a dashboard figurine, a tattoo or a covered car becomes part of the same landscape, where an imported mythology meets the familiarity of an Italian weekend.

A Quarter Mile of America follows the making of this place, and the people willing to give so much of their lives to something so brief. An America assembled, inhabited and packed away again — until the next race. The Rivanazzano Dragway.