Paolo Morello studied at the University Iuav of Venice, at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, and at St John’s College, Oxford. While a student in Venice, he wrote extensively about the History of Museum and Museum Sciences. In 1989, invited to write an essay on Carlo Scarpa’s museums by the magazine ‘Artforum’, he found and published some 300 drawings for one of his most famous projects, that of palazzo Abatellis in Palermo, realized in 1953. For over forty years, those sketches had been intensively hunted for, but considered lost.
From 1998 onward, he pursued and developed his career as a photographic historian, photographer, collector, and publisher. He taught Photography and History of Photography at the universities of Palermo, Bologna, Brescia, Verona, at the Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice, at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, and from 2001 through to 2009 at the Università Iuav in Venice. At the Università Cattolica in Milan, he founded and directed the two-year Master’s course in Photography. From 2001 to 2010 he was contributing editor of the magazine ‘History of Photography’, and from 1999 to 2011 he directed the Istituto Superiore per la Storia della Fotografia.
He is the author of many seminal works on the history of photography in Italy, among them: Enzo Sellerio fotografo. Tre studi siciliani (1998); Briganti (1999); Amen fotografia (2000); Gli Incorpora (2000); Fulvio Roiter (2002); Alfredo Camisa. Carteggio 1955-1963 (2003); Piergiorgio Branzi (2003); Mario De Biasi (2003); Ferruccio Ferroni. Carteggio 1952-1959 (2004); Mario Lasalandra. Poeti, maschere, attori, fantasmi (2005); Gianni Berengo Gardin. Venezia (2006); Mario De Biasi. Budapest 1956 (2006); Carla Cerati. Nudi (2007); Gianni Berengo Gardin. Polesine (2008). In 2008, the Istituto Superiore per la Storia della Fotografia also published his popular Guida pratica al mercato della fotografia (A Practical Handbook to the Photography Market, 2008), and 2010 saw the publication of his ground-breaking twin-volume study La fotografia in Italia.
An enthusiastic patron, over the past fifteen years he has been putting together an outstanding collection of photographs, originally intended to form the first Museum in Italy entirely dedicated to Italian photography. A wide selection of masterpieces were exhibited in Paris (2007), Milan (2010), and Moscow (2011). In 2012, Christie’s in London held an auction entirely devoted to it.
Also a committed photographer, he has published Ficus (2007), La pazienza del legno (2009), Tu sei Quello (2011), and in Glint’s hand-made luxury editions, In the Beginning, The Tale of the Ficus, Aphrodite’s Nostalgia, The Dream of the Ladder, and A Journey to Sicily.
Petra in ancient Times
The oldest settlements in the area of Petra were inhabited by the Edomites – who were mentioned in the Book of Exodus – between the end of the VIII century and the beginning of the VII century BC. The town flourished a little later on thanks to the Nabataeans, an Arab nomadic tribe. In the first half of the II century BC the Nabataeans gave life to their kingdom, establishing in Petra their capital. Its ascent was mainly due to three different factors: the orography, which made it unconquerable, the abundance of water, and, most of all, the location. For several centuries Petra was the crossroads of the caravan routes from Aqaba and Yemen to Damascus and to Constantinople, which is to say, to all of the trade routes leading to a variety of goods – spices, incense, perfumes...