Gelatin silver print, printed later
cm 50,6 x 40,8 (cm 42,8 x 29,5 picture) | 19.9 x 16 in. (16.9 x 11.6 in. picture)
Signed in pencil with photographer's credit stamp and printer's stamp on the verso


Snow was expected in that 1956 in order to effectively produce a monographic book on Umbria that would later be published by the Swiss publisher 'La guilde du livre', but the snow was late in coming. It suddenly arrived and Fulvio Roiter rushed to Umbria to look for the right shots that would lead, as the title 'Umbria, Land of St. Francis' suggested, to interpret the region from both a secular and spiritual point of view. One day, as he was crossing a mountainous stretch with his coach, he saw a man commuting with two horses in tow. He decisively forced the driver to make an unscheduled stop and rushed with his Rolleiflex to film the scene: he hoped that the man would move slightly away from the animal so as not to confusingly overlap the two figures, and as soon as this happened, he shot. Thus the wide view of the enchanting natural landscape occupying a large part of the picture became the most suitable frame for framing those three small delicate dark figures standing out against the white of the snow and this became the most famous of the photographs in the book.