The Gianni Borgna Award was devised by the Associazione Visioneroma, in conunction with Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, to invite young photographers aged between 18 and 30 to take a fresh, informed and personal look at Rome. The competition is named after Gianni Borgna, a man who proved capable of transforming Rome’s rapport with its citizens. This enthusiastic yet stringent thinker, a central figure in the cultural life of Rome and indeed of Italy as a whole, was the city’s Councillor for Cultural Affairs from 1993 to 2006. The traces of his work may still be detected in Rome’s cultural vibrancy and in the way the city still seeks to think of itself and to tell its own story today.
The 2025 edition of the Gianni Borgna Award chose Roma vissuta (Rome as a personal experience) for its theme: not the picture-postcard city but the city that leaves its mark on each individual’s memory. The young photographers were invited to explore the relationship between urban landscapes and landscapes of the soul, between the monumentality of the historic centre and the suburbs that Pier Paolo Pasolini so often transformed into stories.
Set within a broader season that Palaexpo devoted to photography, the Gianni Borgna Award’s photographic competition urged young people to look at Rome without filters, to grasp its contradictions, its unexpected beauty and the traces of those who live there.