I left my hometown of Messina at 18 years of age to study in Milan. Complaining about the state of Messina is a municipal sport. Most people despise the city and wish they could live somewhere else. Some people love it but can’t find a job. The city routinely scores as one of the worst places to live in Italy. Once I left, I slowly detached myself from everything my hometown meant –not only because Milan was shimmering and overwhelming but also as a survival mechanism. People made fun of my Sicilian accent and all my lived experiences now seemed too provincial and in a sense even embarrassing. I changed my way of speaking and stopped mentioning Sicily in order to be taken seriously and to become more “cultured” in the eyes of Milan people. This is something a lot of people from the south of Italy go through when moving to the north. It was only once I moved to London that my accent came back again (nobody cared anymore) and I realised how emotionally intertwined I was with my hometown. Going back home became more expensive and rare and I started discovering my hometown like a tourist, trying all the foods I didn’t even know about and serendipitously going around with my camera and seeing things for the first time or the umpteenth time with curiosity and fascination. Unlike a tourist though I know all the places and I am no longer looking for either the beautiful or the dilapidated. “Solubile” means soluble in Italian, just like those powdered medicines to be dissolved in water. All the things I see with my camera like tiny granules dissolving the beautiful and the dilapidated, the colourful and the blackened, the cultured and the popular, the natural and the artificial, in this weird swirl of sentimentality, familiarity, estrangement, melancholia I feel whenever I go back and look around and then when I go back abroad and look at the photos I took and accumulated.  It’s my way to be part of the city even from far away. Every time I go back people talk to me in English or think I am a tourist, but I do feel like I belong, like a scar that’s engraved in me and these photos are building my mostly platonic relationship to the city.