Pietro Merenda, in compiling the Vademecum from which we take our inspiration, enriches the meticulous description of the places with a photographic documentation that offers an extraordinary testimony of the landscape of the time and allows us to grasp its changes. The photo hunt in search of the places where the pictures were taken, to retake the same shot after more than 110 years, began as a fun pastime, but as we proceeded, we realised that such a search was giving us a great gift: a reconciliation with our most recent history. Accustomed to the looming ecological disaster, the senseless use of the soil, the fires, and the squatting of the metropolitan suburbs, we had not realised, however, that the mountainous and agricultural area around Palermo in the post-war period has undergone an obvious inverse process: reforestation, a reduction in soil erosion, and the prevalence of non-intensive agriculture, in most cases family-run, which together with the interplay of shapes produced by the extraordinary orographic conformation often offer a rare sense of harmony and beauty. Here are some of these photos with descriptions taken from Pietro Merenda’s Vademecum