“The man who mistook his wife for a hat” “The man who mistook his wife for a hat” is the opening story of the homonymous book. It is the case of a musician who could not visually recognise people or objects, he confused animated forms with inanimate and vice versa (he took a person a hydrant and his wife for a hat). In actual fact this agnosia simply did not permit him to perceive an overall image and he could only see certain details. If the details were sufficiently peculiar (notable traits such as a big nose, a heavy head of hair or a sizeable door handle) he could connect the detail with the object and attempt to recognise it otherwise he was totally incapable of saying what he was looking at or touching. Though the patient spoke about things he knew he was actually not able to see them anymore: he recognised people from their voice or from their gait, but not always. Again in this case the only thing that allowed him to exist without disintegrating because of his dysfunction was to relate everything to an ongoing flux, a kind of “basso continuo” or melody. He did everything singing softly: he got dressed singing, he ate singing and obviously he was an excellent music teacher because there was always a melody, harmony that held him by the hand. He built his own world and convictions by means of associations (if he recognised a hand, that hand belonged to a body; if it moved, it belonged to a living being), lack of motion, the stillness of an object was problematic for him, a photograph meant nothing to him because it did not give him any information, only a confused mass of light and shadow. Only physical or intellectual motion, being carried away by vision or by the intellect allowed him to grasp a scrap of reality and from that scrap recompose the rest. I shot this photograph in St. Mark’s Square. I had framed a group of teenagers sitting on the gangways for flood tide. They were all moving continuously except for two on the right: I focused on the hand of the last one timing the shutter slow enough to stop them, then I continued shooting and superimposing with a slow timing to gain an indistinct moving effect in the rest of the image. I believe this is the kind of chaos that the patient suffered in this story: overall confused shapes where only a few details allow the interpretation of the rest.