Andrea Casta — Ten Years of Photography and Film with an Electric Violinist
I've photographed and filmed Andrea Casta for ten years. In that time we've stood on the stage of the Circo Massimo while 70,000 people waited for Vasco Rossi. We've been inside the Stadio Olimpico while the Lazio ultras shook the north stand. We've shot on a military cargo aircraft with the hold door open somewhere between Rome and Sardinia. We've worked inside the Casa Albero in Fregene — Pietro Perugini's brutalist tree house, one of the strangest and most beautiful spaces I've ever put a camera inside.
Ten years. Dozens of projects. No wasted words between us.
The Circo Massimo
It was a summer evening in 2022. 70,000 people in the heat, waiting for Vasco Rossi. Andrea was opening — just him, his electric violin, and that crowd.
Standing on that stage, I understood something I'd never felt before from behind a lens. The sound hits you physically. The energy of 70,000 people focused on a single point — it's not something you observe. It takes you over. My skin was electric. I was shaking.
I've shot concerts for years. I know how to read a stage, how to anticipate movement, how to work the light. None of that prepared me for the Circo Massimo. You stop thinking technically. You just shoot and trust that your hands remember what your mind has forgotten.
That night I understood what performers feel when a crowd swallows them whole.
The Derby
The Stadio Olimpico before a Rome derby is not a place for the faint-hearted. The Curva Nord is its own universe. And Andrea Casta walks out onto the pitch and plays the Lazio anthem.
I Giardini di Marzo by Battisti, arranged for electric violin, played under 70,000 people divided between love and hatred for each other, united for three minutes in something that sounds like a prayer.
I filmed him from the pitch, from the stands, from the tunnel. There is a particular quality to that light — the floodlights, the green grass, the white and sky-blue — that you don't find anywhere else. Event photography and film at this level is not about being in the right place. It's about being so familiar with your subject that you can predict where the moment will be half a second before it happens.
With Andrea, after ten years, I always know.
The Cargo Aircraft
Some projects you remember not for the result but for the experience of making them.
The Aeronautica Militare tribute video was shot on a working military cargo aircraft in flight. The hold door was open. We were somewhere between Rome and Sardinia, at altitude, with the wind coming through at full force. Andrea played. I filmed. The light through that open door was something no studio could reproduce — harsh, directional, moving with the turbulence of the air.
It was one of the most technically demanding and emotionally intense shoots I've done. The kind of experience that recalibrates what you think is possible with a camera in your hands.
The Casa Albero
Pietro Perugini built the Casa Albero in Fregene in the 1970s. It is brutalist architecture at its most strange and human — a house that grows from the ground like a living thing, concrete and organic at the same time.
We shot there for The Space Violin Project. The space demands a response from whoever enters it. Andrea responded with music. I responded with a camera. The result was one of those collaborations where the location becomes the third artist in the room.
The Club Sessions
Not every great shoot happens in front of 70,000 people. Some of the work I'm most proud of with Andrea happened in intimate settings — private clubs, live sessions, performances for small rooms where every face in the crowd is visible.
The energy is completely different from a stadium. More concentrated. More personal. The camera can get closer. The performer has nowhere to hide — and with Andrea, that's never a problem. He gives everything in every room, whether there are twenty people or twenty thousand.
On Working With Andrea
Ten years of working with the same person teaches you things about photography and film that no technical course ever could.
Andrea has charisma, warmth, and complete professionalism — he shows up knowing what he wants to give, and he trusts me to find it in the frame. That trust is everything. When a performer stops thinking about the camera, the real images become possible.
Over ten years we've built a shorthand. A look across the set is enough. I know when he's about to do something extraordinary. He knows I'll be there when he does.
Concert photography and event film at their best are not documentation. They're translation — taking the energy of a moment that exists in time and space and fixing it into something that transmits the feeling to someone who wasn't there.
After ten years with Andrea Casta, I'm still learning how to do that well.