One Picture Book Two #54 : The Shipwreck by Francesca Todde (2026)

Small format hardcover, 6 x 8 1/2, 16 pages, 16 duotone plates, 1 original signed photograph

In new condition

About

Francesca Todde’s The Shipwreck gathers images born from her long immersion in the life and world of Goliarda Sapienza (Catania, 1924 - Gaeta, 1996), a journey that also led to the publication of IUZZA. Goliarda Sapienza (Départ Pour l’Image, 2024). This smaller sequence, partly unpublished, feels more intimate and fragmentary: a precious series of visual notes emerging from the margins of a larger exploration.

Sapienza, whose writing has been described as “a treasure salvaged from a wreckage,” was an Italian writer, actress and feminist best known today for her unconventional, semi-autobiographical novel The Art of Joy. Born at the foot of Mount Etna - an active volcano in Sicily - into a politically radical and intellectual family, she transcended fixed categories, embodying an ongoing tension between collapse and reinvention. . Todde approaches her world through a sensuous and deeply physical Mediterranean landscape — one shaped not by spectacle, but by touch, memory, mythology and desire. Like fragments recovered from the sea, these images move between intimacy and disappearance, carrying the quiet intensity of something both lost and rediscovered.