Your First Bologna Project: Choose One

Here are eight project ideas built for Bologna, each with a starter brief. Choose one to commit to for your first year. Do not try to do several; the power of a project is in its focus. Pick the one that pulls at you, and let it shape your daily walks.

Eight project ideas

1. The Porticoes. Bologna's 62 km of arcades, as light, rhythm, and shelter. Photograph the play of sun and shadow down the columns, the lone figures emerging from dark into light, the way the city lives under cover. The most quintessentially Bolognese project, and endlessly rich.

2. The Markets. The Quadrilatero, Mercato delle Erbe, Mercato delle Albani. Hands, faces, transactions, the daily commerce of food. A project that forces candid courage and the 1-metre rule, and connects you to the city's daily life.

3. The University Quarter. Via Zamboni and Piazza Verdi, the life of the oldest university on earth: students, books, posters, protest, debate. You will be one of them, so this is a project from the inside.

4. Faces of Bologna. A series of consented portraits of the people you meet: shopkeepers, students, the zdaura at the market, the jazz musician. Each with a short story. A project built on conversation.

5. Bologna by Night. The city after dark: blue-hour porticoes, neon, wet cobblestones with the CPL, the Pratello's evening crowds, Locomotiv Club. Your U2 mode as a year-long study.

6. La Rossa in Black and White. The challenge of translating Bologna's famous red and ochre into the mid-tone grays of monochrome, finding the structure within the warmth. A tonal and conceptual project.

7. Rituals. The recurring rhythms of Bolognese life: the morning coffee al banco, the passeggiata, the aperitivo, the Sunday lunch, the football match. The patterns that make a culture.

8. The Edges. Bolognina and the changing periphery, the city in transition, the meeting of old and new Bologna. The most documentary and demanding option, requiring sensitivity and time.

How to choose

Read all eight and notice which one makes you want to leave the house right now. That pull is the answer. Then write a one-paragraph brief in your journal: what the project is, why it pulls you, where and when you will shoot it, and what you hope to learn. Commit, and let the year build it.

Put it into practice

Choose one project, write its brief, and make the first ten frames this week.