In the spring of 2012, Stefano De Luigi, armed only with two iPhone 3s to document his travels, set out to retrace the Mediterranean voyage of Homer’s Odysseus, considered one of the greatest masterpieces of Western literature. It was composed in the late 8th century B.C. and together with the Iliad, it is one of the oldest and most influential poems in Western culture. Traveling through Turkey, Greece, Tunisia, and Italy, De Luigi took Hipstamatic photos, recorded noises from streets and seas, filmed cities and ships, and asked people he met along the way to read excerpts from the Odyssey in their mother tongue. “The epic has its roots in an oral tradition, transmitted by itinerant poets, singers, and storytellers,” De Luigi writes. “In contemporary society, the digital revolution has drastically changed the transmission of knowledge and information. Everyone can now be a storyteller.”
