Two thousand jars in an old seventeenth-century mill
The subject
UNE, Giulio Gigli's restaurant in Capodacqua di Foligno, in an old mill beside the springs it is named after: a Michelin star and a Green Star.
The point of view
The idea started before I reached the restaurant: UNE means water in an ancient Umbrian dialect, and preserves in jars are mostly liquid inside. That is how the photograph of Giulio Gigli in front of the pantry, in light painting, was born.
The jars are time capsules, and time and photography always have an intense relationship: we shot them in a clinical, laboratory way on a white background, which brings out the colours and elements inside them even more.
The journey
March 2026: a shoot for Italia Squisita's feature Anatomia di un piatto, issue 55, that came after a first contact with Giulio Gigli on Instagram.
Food & Beverage Photography: UNE / Giulio Gigli
In March 2026, Italia Squisita commissioned me to shoot Anatomia di un piatto (Anatomy of a Dish), the magazine’s regular feature that takes a single dish apart into what makes it: the raw material, the gesture, the idea holding it together. The subject was UNE, Giulio Gigli’s restaurant in Capodacqua di Foligno, Umbria.
Gigli’s kitchen doesn’t live in the dining room, or even at the stove — it lives in the pantry. About two thousand jars a year, over a hundred recipes in rotation across oil preserves, sweet-and-sour pickles, syrups, flower vinegars and ferments. The preserves aren’t stock; they’re how UNE holds twelve months of the garden inside a single plate. Photographing that dish meant photographing the archive behind it.
The brief: four subjects, one visual system
The editorial team asked for four different things in one shoot: the plating process, a portrait of the finished dish, a mosaic of the pantry’s preserve jars, a block of macro shots of the ingredients seen through glass, and portraits of the chef. Four registers that need to sit on the same magazine spread without reading as four separate assignments stitched together. I built them as variations on the same light: a neutral background and light shaped on the glass for the jar catalogue, so each preserve read by colour and density; close macro work where the glass stops being a container and becomes an optical filter; light painting in the pantry for the portraits, long exposures holding the chef and the shelves behind him together in the same frame.
Part of the work never shows on the printed page: cataloguing. Every jar was shot and delivered with its exact caption — green tomatoes in oil, sweet-and-sour radishes, white mulberries in umeboshi, syrupy green almond hulls, sweet-and-sour ramsons. On a piece like this, naming is part of the photography: without the right name, a picture of a preserve is just coloured glass.
Shot on location at the restaurant in a single day, with the edit delivered the following week. The images ran in Italia Squisita issue 55, alongside the Anatomia di un piatto feature.
Scope of work: dish photography, product still life on neutral background, macro photography, environmental portraiture and light painting, location and garden photography. Editorial commission for a trade magazine.
Do you have a subject that deserves a point of view, not just a photograph?