Growing up in Rome, even as a non religious individual, the figure of the Pope has always had a profound and fascinating cultural impact on the eternal city and it´s inhabitants.
I still vividly remember magnetically staring at the television screen in 2005, when the seemingly endless crowd quietly merged on Saint Peter’s square, after the death of Joan Paul II.
Those images showed me a familiar place like I had never seen it before during my then short lifetime, filled with people that lost something very close to their hearts.
Twenty years have passed, I moved away from Rome, to a different country, but I found myself landing back on my home soil the day of the funeral of Pope Francis, days after Easter.
I immediately felt the need to head to Saint Peter and document the absence of this figure that so many in the city and abroad follow as a spiritual guide throughout their lives.
What I found in front of my eyes are images of two hundred thousand people colliding in one place, empty of it´s keeper.
In a unique space of joyful silence, blending sadness and hope, I walked the square for hours in the early hours of the morning, experiencing what twenty years prior I could only sense through a television screen.
These images are a portion of my experience, and I hope they can spark the same curiosity that brought me here twenty years ago, into your eyes.
Saint Peter Square, Rome, April 27th 2025.
Giacomo Lenzi (b. 1996) is an Italian multidisciplinary artist born in Rome, living and working in Copenhagen. His work focuses on the interaction between time and visual perception, mainly explored through process based photography, light and video art.