Hidden along Venice’s alleys, courtyards, and canals lies an overlooked archive: centuries-old graffiti etched into stone. Names, dates, ships, faces, love declarations, religious symbols, political mottos — thousands of marks left by ordinary Venetians, from shipbuilders and prisoners to craftsmen and lovers.

Together with writer Alberto Toso Fei and researcher Desi Marangon, this project has mapped more than 6,000 of these inscriptions. These engravings reveal a “history from below” — the silent testimony of everyday life beneath the grandeur of the Serenissima.

This photographic series does more than record the marks themselves: it seeks to evoke the hands that carved them, the stories they hint at, and the layers of memory still embedded in the city’s stones. In Venice, history is not only found in monuments, but in the scratches and signs that make its walls a living manuscript.