Difficult to photograph Venice - one of the most photographed cities in the world - without falling very quickly in the common places: the bridge of sighs, Saint Mark's square, the posts which stand out in the fog, the fuzzy gondolas that bunches of long exposure photographers cherish to fix on the film at sunrise and sunset ... Difficult to escape also the flow of tourists, their selfie-sticks, their propensity to always stand in the wrong place - generally right in front of your lens...

No doubt, some of the photos that follow do not escape some common places. Their author sometimes had to fight against the cold, the fog, the rain, and the selfie-sticks to take them. Anyway, they represent my vision of Venice - ghost city emptied here of those who disfigure it too often, by the magic of the long exposure.

My Venice is a winter city, eternally shrouded in mist and silence. Sometimes a shadow or a fugitive silhouette crosses it, to return immediately to nothingness. My Venice is a solitary city, frozen in time, crystallized in the expectation of its own disappearance. I've never been so happy as those December mornings when I walked alone through its streets, its quays, its bridges, in search of images that would capture la bellezza della serenissima.

The following photos represent a small sample of a series that began two years ago and is expected to continue into the future. They owe much to the advice of my wife, Tiphaine, who accompanies me in all my travels and who, as much as I, fell in love with the old city. Our walks in the Canareggio, Dorsoduro, San Polo, Santa Croce, the Old Ghetto, were for me a source of inspiration. The meetings that we did there were often magical, like the meeting with the wonderful actor Bruno Ganz, in the gardens of the Rezzonico Palazzio, on a warm winter morning. I still remember this bench where he was reading a manuscript, a black cat sitting by his side, I remember our conversation in my bad English and then in French, I remember the winter roses in the garden, and the soft rain while we quit. I have memories of Venice for a thousand years