Youth Magazine

top of page

Capri: Where the Idea of the Italian Vacation Was Born

Today, summer is synonymous with the sea, aperitifs at sunset, and days without a schedule. But the very concept of a vacation is much more recent than one might think. For centuries, travel was not for leisure: it was for education, trade, or necessity. Between the 18th and 19th centuries, young European aristocrats embarked on the Grand Tour—long journeys through Italy to discover its art, history, and landscapes. Capri soon became part of this story: a small, sun-drenched island that began to attract artists, writers, and intellectuals in search of inspiration. Even before it became a glamorous destination, Capri already held the promise of escape.

The Invention of the Italian Vacation

In the 20th century, the meaning of travel changed profoundly. With the economic boom, tourism grew and a new concept of leisure emerged.

Capri: Where the Idea of the Italian Vacation Was Born

Today, summer is synonymous with the sea, aperitifs at sunset, and days without a schedule. But the very concept of a vacation is much more recent than one might think. For centuries, travel was not for leisure: it was for education, trade, or necessity. Between the 18th and 19th centuries, young European aristocrats embarked on the Grand Tour—long journeys through Italy to discover its art, history, and landscapes. Capri soon became part of this story: a small, sun-drenched island that began to attract artists, writers, and intellectuals in search of inspiration. Even before it became a glamorous destination, Capri already held the promise of escape.

The Invention of the Italian Vacation

In the 20th century, the meaning of travel changed profoundly. With the economic boom, tourism grew and a new concept of leisure emerged.

A time without Wi-Fi: is it nostalgia, or a longing for what we never had?

A red car packed with kids, the tailgate open on a country road. A ball rolling down a cobblestone alley while two kids play tennis with a single racket. Hands stained with tomato breaking off pieces of bruschetta in the sun. A ride on a Vespa along the waterfront, without a helmet. The images scroll by, all looking the same, especially in the summer, across dozens of accounts: grainy film, low light, no smartphones in sight. The caption, almost always, says the same thing. Once upon a time, there were summers without Wi-Fi.

A genre that thrives on repetition

The format works. Posts dedicated to “summers without Wi-Fi” are multiplying with thousands of shares. The writing is recognizable: the intercom ringing instead of a notification, the bike tossed on the grass, the sun dictating the schedule, foosball, scraped knees, songs memorized because they played on the radio just once. It’s a genre now, with its own rules and quirks. And like all genres, it thrives on repetition.
The interesting part isn’t the nostalgia itself. It’s who feels it. Because it’s not just forty- or fifty-somethings who actually lived through those summers who get emotional looking at those cars or red Vespas. It’s also—and increasingly so—young people who weren’t even born yet during the era being evoked. They long for something they never had.

A word for the longing for a time never known

There is a word for this. Anemoia: the nostalgia for a time or place one has never known. The term was coined in 2012 by American author John Koenig in his *Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows*, and since then it has become a recurring lens through which to describe Gen Z’s relationship with the past. It is not a recent invention of sentiment (19th-century Romantics felt something similar when rediscovering the Middle Ages), but it is the first time it has circulated at this speed and with this intensity, fueled by the very feeds it is supposed to reject.

A time without Wi-Fi: is it nostalgia, or a longing for what we never had?

A red car packed with kids, the tailgate open on a country road. A ball rolling down a cobblestone alley while two kids play tennis with a single racket. Hands stained with tomato breaking off pieces of bruschetta in the sun. A ride on a Vespa along the waterfront, without a helmet. The images scroll by, all looking the same, especially in the summer, across dozens of accounts: grainy film, low light, no smartphones in sight. The caption, almost always, says the same thing. Once upon a time, there were summers without Wi-Fi.

A genre that thrives on repetition

The format works. Posts dedicated to “summers without Wi-Fi” are multiplying with thousands of shares. The writing is recognizable: the intercom ringing instead of a notification, the bike tossed on the grass, the sun dictating the schedule, foosball, scraped knees, songs memorized because they played on the radio just once. It’s a genre now, with its own rules and quirks. And like all genres, it thrives on repetition.
The interesting part isn’t the nostalgia itself. It’s who feels it. Because it’s not just forty- or fifty-somethings who actually lived through those summers who get emotional looking at those cars or red Vespas. It’s also—and increasingly so—young people who weren’t even born yet during the era being evoked. They long for something they never had.

A word for the longing for a time never known

There is a word for this. Anemoia: the nostalgia for a time or place one has never known. The term was coined in 2012 by American author John Koenig in his *Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows*, and since then it has become a recurring lens through which to describe Gen Z’s relationship with the past. It is not a recent invention of sentiment (19th-century Romantics felt something similar when rediscovering the Middle Ages), but it is the first time it has circulated at this speed and with this intensity, fueled by the very feeds it is supposed to reject.

Vintage music and the need to slow down: the return of the underground in an era where everything is always visible

There were clubs without specific signs, concerts announced with poorly photocopied flyers, hand-duplicated cassettes, and DJs who became legends without ever showing their faces. Music, before being content, was an environment. A physical space to navigate. It took time to enter it: you had to know where to go, who to follow, what to look for.

Today, music is everywhere. It flows continuously through TikTok, algorithmic playlists, Reels, fifteen-second snippets, and weekly releases designed to never interrupt the flow. It has never been so accessible. And yet, just as everything becomes instantly available, there’s a growing fascination with musical eras that many young people have never truly experienced.

Credits Bowie Pinterest

Vintage music and the need to slow down: the return of the underground in an era where everything is always visible

There were clubs without specific signs, concerts announced with poorly photocopied flyers, hand-duplicated cassettes, and DJs who became legends without ever showing their faces. Music, before being content, was an environment. A physical space to navigate. It took time to enter it: you had to know where to go, who to follow, what to look for.

Today, music is everywhere. It flows continuously through TikTok, algorithmic playlists, Reels, fifteen-second snippets, and weekly releases designed to never interrupt the flow. It has never been so accessible. And yet, just as everything becomes instantly available, there’s a growing fascination with musical eras that many young people have never truly experienced.

Credits Bowie Pinterest

Before Shared Intimacy
For a generation raised amid an overproduction of images, the work of Goldin and Morrisroe resonates in a special way. Today, intimacy is everywhere: shared, mediated, often performed. But precisely for this reason, it rarely involves any real risk.

In the 1980s, exposing oneself meant much more. It meant making visible identities and relationships that society tended to marginalize or erase. It meant, in some cases, exposing oneself to real consequences.

A language that still exists

Goldin and Morrisroe’s images do not ask to be viewed as testimonies of a bygone era, but as the origin of a language we now take for granted.

The idea that private life can be public matter, that the body can be portrayed unfiltered, that vulnerability can be shown: all of this has a precise genealogy. It is no coincidence that their work continues to be cited, exhibited, and reprinted. Not out of nostalgia, but because it addresses a question that remains open: what does it truly mean to reveal oneself?

Goldin and Morrisroe weren’t building an archive. They were living. The images came later, almost as an inevitable consequence. And perhaps this is what makes them so difficult to reduce to a style even today: they weren’t created to be looked at. They were created because, at that moment, there was no other way to stay.

credits Nan Goldin

Before Shared Intimacy
For a generation raised amid an overproduction of images, the work of Goldin and Morrisroe resonates in a special way. Today, intimacy is everywhere: shared, mediated, often performed. But precisely for this reason, it rarely involves any real risk.

In the 1980s, exposing oneself meant much more. It meant making visible identities and relationships that society tended to marginalize or erase. It meant, in some cases, exposing oneself to real consequences.

A language that still exists

Goldin and Morrisroe’s images do not ask to be viewed as testimonies of a bygone era, but as the origin of a language we now take for granted.

The idea that private life can be public matter, that the body can be portrayed unfiltered, that vulnerability can be shown: all of this has a precise genealogy. It is no coincidence that their work continues to be cited, exhibited, and reprinted. Not out of nostalgia, but because it addresses a question that remains open: what does it truly mean to reveal oneself?

Goldin and Morrisroe weren’t building an archive. They were living. The images came later, almost as an inevitable consequence. And perhaps this is what makes them so difficult to reduce to a style even today: they weren’t created to be looked at. They were created because, at that moment, there was no other way to stay.

credits Nan Goldin

The Body as Language

What distinguishes these works from much of the photography of the era is the artist’s position. There is no outside. There is no neutral observation. Goldin has repeatedly stated that she uses the camera as a tool to maintain relationships, to avoid losing the people she loves. Morrisroe uses the image to construct a version of himself that can exist even beyond his physical presence. In both cases, photography is not representation but an extension of life.

The visual language is also part of this break. The images are often technically imperfect: blurry, underexposed, grainy. Direct flash flattens the space, making the bodies almost tangible. There is no classical composition, no search for the “beautiful image.” This aesthetic arises from necessity, not as a style.

Credits Nan Goldin

The Body as Language

What distinguishes these works from much of the photography of the era is the artist’s position. There is no outside. There is no neutral observation. Goldin has repeatedly stated that she uses the camera as a tool to maintain relationships, to avoid losing the people she loves. Morrisroe uses the image to construct a version of himself that can exist even beyond his physical presence. In both cases, photography is not representation but an extension of life.

The visual language is also part of this break. The images are often technically imperfect: blurry, underexposed, grainy. Direct flash flattens the space, making the bodies almost tangible. There is no classical composition, no search for the “beautiful image.” This aesthetic arises from necessity, not as a style.

Credits Nan Goldin

Living, Loving, Disappearing: Goldin, Morrisroe, and Photography as Survival

There is a photograph in which everything seems on the verge of breaking. Two bodies close together, direct gazes, the dim light of an ordinary interior. There is no distance, no protection. Nan Goldin wasn’t observing that scene: she was part of it. The same goes for Mark Morrisroe, who in his self-portraits transformed his own existence into visual material, unfiltered, defenseless. In the 1980s, between New York and Boston, photography ceased to be a document and became survival.

Photographing from within

Nan Goldin began building what would become “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” in the late 1970s. It is not a project in the traditional sense: it is a continuous stream of images that tell the story of her life and that of her community: friends, lovers, drag queens, artists, drug addicts. The photographs are projected in slideshows accompanied by music, updated over time, never truly concluded.

At the center is not an aesthetic, but a relationship. Goldin photographs from within, without the distance that documentary photography had always considered necessary.

Mark Morrisroe operates within the same sphere, but with an even more fragile intensity. Raised in Boston, part of the so-called Boston School alongside Nan Goldin and David Armstrong, he creates a deeply autobiographical body of work, composed of Polaroids, manipulated negatives, and prints marked by manual interventions. His self-portraits are never simply images of himself: they are performances, confessions, attempts to exist through the image.

Illustration by “UNTITLED” (STEPHEN, FILM STILL “THE LAZIEST GIRL IN TOWN”) (1981) / THE ESTATE OF MARK MORRISROE (RINGIER COLLECTION) AT FOTOMUSEUM WINTERTHUR

Living, Loving, Disappearing: Goldin, Morrisroe, and Photography as Survival

There is a photograph in which everything seems on the verge of breaking. Two bodies close together, direct gazes, the dim light of an ordinary interior. There is no distance, no protection. Nan Goldin wasn’t observing that scene: she was part of it. The same goes for Mark Morrisroe, who in his self-portraits transformed his own existence into visual material, unfiltered, defenseless. In the 1980s, between New York and Boston, photography ceased to be a document and became survival.

Photographing from within

Nan Goldin began building what would become “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” in the late 1970s. It is not a project in the traditional sense: it is a continuous stream of images that tell the story of her life and that of her community: friends, lovers, drag queens, artists, drug addicts. The photographs are projected in slideshows accompanied by music, updated over time, never truly concluded.

At the center is not an aesthetic, but a relationship. Goldin photographs from within, without the distance that documentary photography had always considered necessary.

Mark Morrisroe operates within the same sphere, but with an even more fragile intensity. Raised in Boston, part of the so-called Boston School alongside Nan Goldin and David Armstrong, he creates a deeply autobiographical body of work, composed of Polaroids, manipulated negatives, and prints marked by manual interventions. His self-portraits are never simply images of himself: they are performances, confessions, attempts to exist through the image.

Illustration by “UNTITLED” (STEPHEN, FILM STILL “THE LAZIEST GIRL IN TOWN”) (1981) / THE ESTATE OF MARK MORRISROE (RINGIER COLLECTION) AT FOTOMUSEUM WINTERTHUR

.pro-gallery-wix-wrapper {display: block !important;} .pro-gallery-wix-wrapper .gallery-item-container {opacity: 1 !important; display: block !important;}

Follow us on Instagram

bottom of page