Marco P. Valli
BOLLITO MAGRO!
Bollito Magro! is a traveling photographic project that crosses Italy by following one of the deepest aspects of its cultural identity: its relationship with food. Through images that portray habits and obsessions tied to the sacred ritual of the table, the project builds a mapping of the country guided by taste and by the extraordinary centrality it holds in the everyday lives of Italians. From north to south, Bollito Magro! tells the story of an Italy in which food is never merely nourishment, but also narrative, memory, and identity. Photography becomes the tool to investigate this visceral bond, giving face and voice to the protagonists of a collective theater of voracity.
Text by Marco P. Valli
BIO
Marco P. Valli (b. 1989) is an Italian photographer based in Milan and represented by CESURA. After graduating in 2009 from the Art Institute of Monza, in 2010 he attended the Art Academy of Brera before specializing in 2011 at CFP Bauer. In March of the same year, he began an internship at CESURA, an independent group of photographers founded in 2008. After this period, he became part of the group as a photographer. In November 2017, after a few years of research into the subject of sexuality, he made his first book along with Anna Adamo and published by Cesura Publish: Bakeca, a photographic research on exhibitionism as a form of sexual expression. In 2018, together with Luca Santese, he developed the project Realpolitik, a satirical analysis of the Italian political situation after the elections of March 4, 2018, which had been published periodically through a series of volumes and exhibited in experimental installation form. In 2020, Valli made his second book, Il Corpo del Capitano, co-authored with Luca Santese: a critical research on the different perspectives of Matteo Salvini’s propaganda – the political leader of the Italian Lega and center-right forces. Their most recent collaboration, Texas Trigger, was developed through a journey across Texas during the 2024 U.S. presidential election campaign. The project explores key contemporary issues in American society and was published in 2025 by Cesura Publish. Marco’s works have been published by national and international newspapers and magazines (such as Time, Vogue, L’Espresso, Internazionale, La Repubblica, and Vanity Fair) and exhibited all over Italy. He is currently still producing individual and collective projects, focusing his work mainly on documentary photography and research in the artistic sector.