Just beyond the ruins of Pompeii lies another monument to time: the abandoned Fossa di Valle Stadium. Never fully completed and left to decay since the late 1990s, it now exists in a strange state between memory and ruin. In her hauntingly still images, Imma Rhamely Borrelli captures a place where faded concrete, overgrown grass and silence have replaced chants, ambition and noise. Beautiful, eerie and deeply evocative, this is a portrait of abandonment in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius.
A few steps from one of the most famous archaeological sites in the world and the Sanctuary of Our Lady of the Rosary of Pompeii, lies the Fossa di Valle Stadium, which hosted the Youth Games and the amateur championship match of the “Virtus Pompei” team in the early 1990s.
The stadium remained unfinished before being completely abandoned in the late 1990s.
It is still the subject of debate within the local administration regarding the possible redevelopment and redevelopment of the area, ideas that have so far never materialised.
Politics and judicial investigations aside, what attracted me here is the fact that it once was something and now it is no longer.
This ruined amphitheater is a place free from all constraints: the colours of the past have faded over the years, vegetation has taken over unchecked, urban artists have used the worn stone surfaces as canvases for graffiti, the former locker rooms hold who knows what secrets, and the playing field has become a meadow where animals graze.
I had been there in winter, some time ago, and I returned with summer ready to bloom. Aside from the different, clear colours of the sky, I still wonder what happened to the chants that once filled the stands? That hope and adrenaline that only a place like a stadium can provide before a game?
I gaze at this ghostly place, imagining its past, and at the foot of Vesuvius, the landscape is incredibly fascinating, like all abandoned things.
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