A synthetic map of the directions and the testimonies: traces and suggestions proposed by editors and critics aiming at declaring, like in a constant work of digging and monitoring, specific contributions, produced in the threaded of the artistic work of the author.

Pino Guerrera,
from his introduction to
"In-VisibÌlia"

[...]
The description that a photographer is able to make with his eye and his objective would require of architects like we are, a greater effort and a more complex elaboration and it would be far from effective.
[...] What I am interested most of all in the work of photographers is their ability to describe emptiness, as Wenders said in an interview.
I think that in the work of Battaglia, among other things, one could catch this capacity to read and it is not little.
During a journey that I made "near my home" Nunzio let me discover the spaces in my town, where I pass everyday but that I cannot see thoroughly..

Vittorio Savi,
from "Omaggio a L. Ghirri"

...In Nunzio Battaglia is manifest the interiorization of the material subject and of the luministic data and it is amazing how the confined situations and the colourful places from Sicily to Mitteleurope are transformed by the wide-angle lens into dull and dreamy plains, etendues reveuses (as would say the critic Lemagny), plains, metaphors of the soul (as would say the writer Borges, ...)...

Roberto Mutti,
from "Omaggio a Luigi Ghirri"

The work of Nunzio Battaglia should be read going beyond the fragmentary analysis of the single images, but catching, instead, analogies, associations, cross-references that are the core of his complex visual and conceptual path. [...]
This change of perspective often reveals the specific sensitivity of the author who has not forgotten his training as an architect: therefore he just needs to take a step back and change the foreground figure of the first image into a particular that, in the second image, is added to a façade that impress because of the various stylistic elements characterising it. [...]
What appeals to the photographer is the possibility to create analogies, to mark out routes linked by thin and yet strong threads like a spider-web's ones: the explicit reference to the logic of the hypertextual vision through which connections, not always consciously planned by the artist himself, incidentally emerge, becomes a guide uniting him to those following and interpreting his traces. [...]
On the contrary in the photographs of the interiors of Freud's house every object is surely perfectly visible but protected by glass cases that seem having trapped and "killed" them like in big, disturbing show-cases of an entomologist.

Matteo Collura,
from "Città d'anima"

[...]
But, what are these images like, the ones Nunzio Battaglia distils as if using a mental alembic which seems being just of his own? I really do not know how to answer this question but I will try. Some of the photographs of Battaglia were shot in Sicily, which is the land we both come from. Well. While observing those images and, perhaps, even more in a following moment, thinking over and reconstructing them mentally, including colours, they look like some lightning's that blind us inside, in the most varied moments of our life. These lightning's do not help or arouse memory but in that split second they manage to convey me the sense, the most effective synthesis, in my opinion, of Sicily. [...]

Mario Cresci,
from "Citta d'anima"

A thought for Nunzio.

A man was going across the triangular island, looking for the world-sheet where the Big Mother, formerly myth and then archetype, had laid her eggs in the warm sea waters of Stromboli.
In his lonely wanderings he often thought that the absence is the place of image as the silence is the place of the word and that the Big Mother was the underground game between History and Destiny, played on the opaque thickness of the matter and the memory of time, where it is not difficult to perceive which of the two figures is illusion, artifice, unsuccessful attempt.
The triangular island enabled him to see, with the passing of time, inside itself the complexity of its volcanic arteries, reflected in the woods and in the depths of Big Nature that slowly was mirrored in his glances as a traveller.
" If the voyeur could see his own eye" Freud wrote in his attempt of tracing from the image of the world the subjectivity of the one contemplating it.
Nevertheless, the man went on seeing what he imagined to see, but that he well knew belonged to his imagination, so irresistible was his desire to observe the soul of the Big Mother with the knowledge and the awareness that he would never deprive it of the liberty of ever changing to his sight.

Gigliola Foschi,
from "Sightings"

[...]
The hazy and transparent eye, observing us from the photographs of Nunzio Battaglia, becomes an invitation to appropriate and reiterate the same glance which, thoughtfully, rests on the silent objects collected in these images. [...]
the delicate glance we can catch in the photographs of Battaglia was able to seize the moment when the soul, hidden in the object, comes to light, shows itself. Battaglia seems having portrayed the long instant when the objects, the poor inactive things, abandoned and immobilised when needed no-more, give out their humble soul, let it change colour superficially, let it wander inside what we might call the trembling and noiseless underworld of things. [...]
a limbo characterised by a strange languid spatiality, a malleable perspective depth, slightly decentralised and void of vanishing point, a little unbalanced but comfortable. [...]

Diego Mormorio,
from "Città d'anima"

Memory and oblivion keep us incessantly bound to our garden and to the beauty we cultivate in our mind. We cannot, actually, live without a garden since we cannot live without a beauty deeply rooted in nature and inseparable from our acting. This need for beauty is so strong that even though we already have one, we continually long for a further garden. This urge leads us to wander across landscapes to contemplate plants, stones, waters, skies.
Accordingly, our wandering becomes a sort of gardening since it is like a cultivation of our own garden and of the one we are looking for.
In a way I believe that Nunzio Battaglia is doing gardening while making photographs in his wanderings. The pictures he has collected here are nothing else than his garden and, to a certain extent, my garden too.
P.S. Of course, as I said before, one may cultivate more than one garden but obviously only few people, absolutely above the ordinary human weaknesses, manage to have the whole world as their garden.

Denis Curti,
from "Immaginanti"

[...]
You move like an anxious aesthete and, like Predag Matvejievic, you think that the Mediterranean, more than an idea, a place, is, actually, a fate. [...]
You have got the Mediterranean in your blood and once it asked you to be looked at and you, [...] started your journey with your heart in your mouth. [...]
Over there, on the skyline, the colours fused, and appeared the intense need to change things, to ransack drawers, to learn the past, to smell the future to love the present, to allow the imperfect spring.
You had realised that action for action's sake was meaningless.
Now you have finished shooting your photographs. Now that you have catalogued, magnified or reduced them in size you must summon up the courage to edit a story, not to help our understanding but because they belong more and more to yourself. [...]