Cortona on the Move turns its lens on Italy's 'Beautiful Country'

Cortona on the Move 2026, the international photography festival held in the Tuscan hill town, has opened under the title 'Beautiful Country,' the Guardian reports. The festival brings together more than 30 exhibitions that explore Italy 'in all its complexity,' mixing the spirit of the aristocratic grand tour with the depth of contemporary documentary photography.

The title is a deliberate echo of the way Italy has long been seen from abroad. Cortona itself belongs to that history: a hill town on the old route between Rome and Florence, it was the kind of place foreign travellers stopped to sketch and to measure against the classical past. To call the country 'beautiful' now is to raise the question of who is looking, and at what.

The documentary side of the programme answers that question with work shaped by reportage rather than picturesque conventions. That the Guardian presents the festival as a photo gallery, rather than a critical essay, is itself a sign of how such events travel: through images.

Cortona on the Move has become a regular summer appointment in the circuit of European photography festivals that international outlets cover. Its Tuscan setting places it within easy reach of the grand-tour itinerary, but the festival's emphasis on documentary work complicates the postcard image of Italy that the area usually sells. The more than 30 exhibitions announced for this year's edition, as cited by the Guardian, suggest a programme large enough to hold those contradictions at once.

The grand tour was, in part, an exercise in collecting Italy as a sequence of views. Contemporary documentary photography, by contrast, tends to dwell on what the view leaves out: the cost of tourism, the pressure of climate, the social fractures that foreign correspondents have reported from Italy in recent years. If the festival's theme is 'Beautiful Country,' its exhibitions are, on the Guardian's account, 'in all its complexity' — a phrase that admits the beauty but refuses to simplify it.

For Tuscany, the festival is a reminder that the region's cultural economy depends on the foreign gaze even as it tries to redirect it. Events such as this one bring international audiences and international coverage to towns that are not Florence or Siena, and they do so by trading on the very image of Italy that the photographers are asked to examine. The result is a festival that is both inside and outside the postcard tradition — which may be the most fitting position for a photography event in Italy to occupy.