Travel Stories from the Road
Lodi: In Focus
Jul
By the time I reached Lodi, I had already spent a stretch of the year walking through Piacenza, Pavia, and Cremona, each one another data point in a much longer question I was asking myself: could I live here? I was staying in Santo Stefano Lodigiano at the time, close enough to treat Lodi as an easy day trip, and far enough into this search that I’d started noticing my own patterns. Which details I photographed first. Which ones I circled back for. What made a city feel like a place to visit versus a place to actually stay.
Lodi, as it turned out, gave me a lot to focus on.
I hadn’t realized, before arriving, that the city I was about to spend the day photographing was really a second attempt at itself. The original settlement, the Roman town of Laus Pompeia, stood a few kilometers from where I was walking until it was destroyed in the twelfth century. Frederick Barbarossa refounded the city in 1158, not on the old ruins but along the banks of the Adda, in a spot better suited to defending and controlling the surrounding territory. Construction on the new cathedral began that same day. Everything about the city, in other words, started over at once, history and faith and stone all laid down together.
There’s something fitting about photographing a place that already knows how to reinvent itself.
That cathedral still anchors Piazza della Vittoria, and the square itself might be the most purely photogenic corner of Lodi. It’s lined with porticoes on all four sides, a layout that’s rarer than you’d think even in a country full of beautiful piazzas, and the cobblestones underfoot have been there since the fifteenth century. It’s the kind of square that isn’t trying to be a monument. People actually use it. I spent a long stretch there just people-watching, camera half-forgotten in my hand, which is usually a good sign that a place is working on me in a way that has nothing to do with photography.
That’s the tension I kept returning to in Lodi: the pull between documenting a place and imagining a life inside it.
As a travel photographer, I’m used to being asked what I specialize in, and my easy answer is architecture and cityscapes. The truer answer is that I’m fascinated by perspective, by the geometry and light and unexpected juxtapositions that most people walk past without a second look. After more than seventy cities across Italy, the challenge isn’t finding landmarks. It’s finding a fresh way to see them, or better, finding what isn’t a landmark at all. Sometimes I try to photograph a place the way someone might experience it after decades of living there. Other times I try to catch an angle a lifelong resident has never noticed. Lodi kept reminding me that every city holds more photographs than anyone could ever take. You just have to slow down long enough to notice them.
Slowing down is easier in Lodi than in most places I’d visited on this trip, and I got distracted early by a single church I hadn’t planned on stopping for: La Chiesa di San Rocco. Looking into it later, I learned that Lodi once had four churches dedicated to San Rocco, the saint invoked against plague, each one positioned beside a different city gate to form a kind of symbolic ring of protection during centuries when epidemics were a real and recurring threat.
Only one of the four remains today, though the church now standing there is an early twentieth-century replacement rather than the original building. It’s a small detail, easy to miss, but it’s the sort of thing that rewards the kind of aimless wandering I did that day, zigzagging from the center out toward the river, along the periphery, and back again before heading to the station.
Once you stop hunting for the obvious landmarks, Lodi starts handing you smaller things instead: a worn door frame, a run of decorative brickwork, a church façade that’s been repaired and repainted so many times the layers have become part of the surface itself. Those are the details I actually went there for.
The Adda River surprised me more than I expected. The historic center gives you exactly what you’d predict from a Lombard town like this- brickwork, quiet streets, a strong sense of structure- but walk toward the water and the whole pace of the place shifts. Everything gets wider. Softer. The Adda doesn’t try to overwhelm Lodi the way some riverfront cities lean into drama. It just gives the town room to breathe, and reminds you that Lodi isn’t only its piazzas and buildings, but also the landscape quietly holding all of it in place.
Above the rooftops, the Torrione di Lodi kept doing the same thing to me that the river did, just vertically. Francesco Sforza added the round tower to the old Visconti Castle in 1456, and centuries later, in the early 1900s, the city raised it further and repurposed it as a water reservoir, an oddly practical afterlife for a medieval military structure.
At only around 33 meters, it doesn’t dominate the skyline so much as keep reappearing in it. You catch it in the gap between two buildings, then lose it, then find it again from a completely different angle a few streets later. Eventually it stops feeling like a landmark and starts feeling like a fixed point the rest of the city quietly orients itself around. That’s genuinely what I was photographing- not the tower itself, but the way it kept showing up.
Not overplanning the day turned out to be the whole point.
I wasn’t rushing toward a next destination. I was just walking around in the place I was already in, noticing the tower above the rooftops, the color of the shutters, the light hitting one particular street I almost didn’t turn down. I got turned around more than once and let myself stay that way. I stopped to pet a stranger’s dog because that’s what the moment offered me, and there was no real reason not to take it.
There’s no pressure to make a city into anything more than what it is, if you let yourself walk it that way. That’s one of the better ways I’ve found to experience Italy in general- when you stop trying to extract meaning from a place and just let yourself be inside it for a while, you tend to actually see more.
After a stretch of visiting busier places, Lodi gave me exactly the kind of slow, grounded, relaxed day I needed. Nothing about it felt forced or overwhelming. And underneath the photography, the practical question was still running quietly in the background, the one I’d carried through Piacenza and Pavia and Cremona and would carry to wherever came after Lodi: could this be it?
If you missed it, here you can read my stories from Torino, Trento, Pescara, Piacenza, Cremona, Pavia.
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Read moreI can absolutely see why people choose to live here and commute back and forth to Milan- the trip takes as little as fifteen minutes depending on the train- and there’s a calmness to Lodi that felt genuinely valuable, especially after months of moving from place to place.
Cheers until next time, Lodi. Thanks for the reset.
