This project was born out of simple curiosity. A perhaps very common curiosity, namely, the desire to travel through time. During our trip, we wanted to discover what Cremona once looked like, how its inhabitants dressed, and how they moved around the city. But someone immediately objected that building a time machine would be too expensive, so we settled on photographs. If we really can't go there in person, we said to ourselves, let's at least look for old photographs. We began by conducting research at the Cremona State Archives, then at the State Library, then at the Urban Planning Department of the Municipality of Cremona. And further: we searched the internet, books, and catalogs; we even contacted several collectors of historical images. In short, in the end, we had satisfied some of our initial curiosity—but not all of it, mind you, because we didn't find any photos of Cremona from Roman times, nor any from the Middle Ages. They must have been lost, we thought. The first photographs we came across date back to the second half of the 19th century and were taken by Aurelio Betri, the founder of a long and important line of photographers who have analyzed virtually every corner of the city. So, that's all, we wanted to share this curiosity with you, and to do so, we attempted to "trace" some photographs from the past. In some cases—many cases—unfortunately, this tracing process was impossible, because the urban landscape had radically changed, with buildings torn down or erected precisely where we should have placed the camera. Tracing a photograph is an operation that requires patience; a van parked in the wrong spot is enough to have you postponing the shot. And it requires trust, because sometimes you have to enter private homes to find the right frame, and explaining to the homeowners that you're traveling through time is no easy task. We've often waged an unequal battle against modern street furniture, invariably positioned inappropriately, at least for our photographic purposes: road signs, traffic lights, and panels of various kinds almost always get in the way and represent perhaps the most striking difference between the city of today and the city of the past, which appears magnificently uncluttered. This publication offers a taste of what we hope will be an even longer journey. A starting point, in short, because we'll continue to retrace photographs, at least until we find one with Julius Caesar at the foot of the Torrazzo.
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