We had already been to the NORTH a year earlier, when—captivated by the inland forests and the strange bipolar climate of constant light or darkness—we visited Tallinn, Helsinki, and other Finnish cities (in particular Savonlinna and Jyväskylä).

We had no clear idea of how Denmark would reveal itself to us, and—due to prejudice—we tended to lump it together with the image we already had of Lithuania and Finland; but we were wrong.
We hadn’t accounted for the cultural and social gap that Estonia, a nation shaped by the Soviet experience, might have compared to the Danish kingdom with its Western imprint. In many respects, Denmark was closer to what we were used to in our own context, yet it had that dash of welfare state that magazines and rankings have always celebrated (see the United Nations’ World Happiness Report);

Nor had we considered the huge natural difference with Finland: on one side the boreal forests dotted with thousands of lakes—each with its own shape and dimension; on the other, the yellow and green horizons of cultivated fields, and the white chalk cliffs of the island of Møn.

A bit disillusioned by the excessive royal pageantry—which here too, as in today’s grand displays of power, shows itself off as a media spectacle for the masses—we decided to approach the journey with a concrete curiosity, less idealized.

Our first impression: lush greenery pleasantly woven into the urban core; castle towers rising above the skyline behind modern buildings, anchoring the city’s present to its past; and a bustling flow of bicycles moving along a complex network of carefully designed bike lanes. A dream—especially this last point—especially if I compare it to Turin, where cars clog the streets to such an extent that they become traffic jams unto themselves, making alternative transportation increasingly unfeasible and dangerous.

So I’d like to start off this first photo series focusing on the bicycle—not just as a “means of transportation” on the road, but above all as a tool to be valued, one that can free us from the dominant, arrogant, and polluted world of cars.