(from book 'By the Glow of the JukeBox: The Americans List' compiled by Jason Eskenazi, Red Hook Editions 2012 - page 60-61) VERSIONE IN ITALIANO QUI

U.S. 285, New Mexico, 1955

"..I am in the middle of my journey. This is what suddenly makes me think this photograph from Robert Frank's 'The Americans'. I am in a nobody's land, over the Cities, after the strange faces of the inhabitans and their mores, gestures and voices and their noisy machines. Basically the Road is the sign for excellence of a travel, of the American culture of Keruac and Ginsberg's Beat Generation. But it is also a meaningful sign of the past of Europe, of the Roman Empire which built up the first Western roads in all Europe (and, by free associations, of all Wim Wenders and Michelangelo Antonioni's cinema with the characters of their movies often lost or looking to be lost on the roads of the world). There is another image of an empty out of city road in Robert Franck's 'Black White and Things' (Landscape, Perù 1948) and one similar for composition also of a New York street (Street Line, New York, 1951). Dorothea Lange too made a famous beautiful horizontal picture of an American road (The Road West, 1938) for the Farm Security Administrator program. In The Americans the images of landscapes or cityscapes or with no people in are very rare. Just for this reason, when I flow throughout the book and over all his heroes and anti-heroes, with their smiling, sad, lone, happy, violent, innocent and 'sick' (as they said at the first publication of the book) eyes and faces, when I flow all over this and arrive to U.S. 285, New Mexico, 1955, I almost feel breathless, as when you see the Monument Valley after a long trip, or the Vatican coming from the narrows little streets of the area around in Rome. It is just like when you arrive at the end of the journey, maybe exhausted, but with that sense of peace and after having done so much you can finally stop and contemplate everything. Maybe the street-line are the last traces of the past civilization. I can discern in the horizon the pulsing light line of the Ultimate City I am looking for, and towards me, a far emissary is slowly coming (or maybe it is something left on the road long time ago). Or perhaps, I am just at the beginning. I see what I am leaving on my back, the car with no more fuel which I left to keep going with my feet. Or it is simply what I have in front of me. The Road, with his majesty of emptiness, promising everything and nothing to me traveler.." © Emiliano Cavicchi