Mario Testino. Ciao

Somewhere between a Positano terrace and a Neapolitan tailor's back room, the line between a private scrapbook and a published book quietly dissolves, and Ciao never fully decides which one it wants to be. Venezia, Roma, Napoli, Firenze: the itinerary is a fantasy of Italy that a great many people already carry around, and Mario Testino, who has spent a career making desire look effortless, mostly confirms it rather than complicating it.

The premise is frankly personal. These are Testino's own photographs, an affectionate ode to the country's people, art, food, and fashion, gathered by a man with the access to be welcomed everywhere and the eye to make it all look like a party you were not quite invited to. Warmth is the dominant mode. So is privilege, and the two are harder to separate than the book seems to think.

That is the catch. The pictures are charming and thin at the same time. Testino's gift has always been surface, the glossy, flattering, high-spirited surface that moves magazines, and pointed at a country he loves, it produces a steady stream of pleasant images with not much underneath them. A grandmother laughing, a boy on a scooter, a plate of something perfect: the moments are real, but they arrive pre-resolved, closer to a luxury travel campaign than to observation. Little here troubles the postcard.

It is worth being clear about what the pictures are not. They are not reportage; the poverty, the emptying villages, the actual friction of contemporary Italy all stay outside the frame. They are not technical showcases either; the lighting is casual, the compositions loose, the whole thing shot in the register of a friend with a very good camera and a very good address book. That looseness is deliberate, and on its own terms honest. It just means the book hands you atmosphere where a working photographer might have hoped for a lesson.

What rescues it from emptiness is that the affection is genuine and, now and then, sharp. Every so often the fashion instinct catches something a tourist would miss, a gesture of style in an old man's posture, the pure theater in how Italians occupy a piazza, the way a fishmonger holds court like a duke, and the frame briefly earns its glamour. As company for an afternoon the book is generous. As a document it asks almost nothing of you.

Come to it for the mood, not for instruction, and set your expectations before you open the cover. Anyone wanting the same photographer working with real focus should pick up MaRIO DE JANEIRO Testino, where a single city pulls his charm into something tighter and stranger. Ciao is a holiday. Enjoy it, then get back to work.