We are the foliage. The story of an autumnal ritual

At 8:40 on a Sunday in late October, the country road winding up towards the Apennine beech forest is at a standstill. Which beech forest matters little: Forca d’Acero, the Simbruini, the Casentino, Canfaito, the Sila… The queue has the resigned composure of predictions that have come true. No one honks their horn because that would mean admitting they’d been deluding themselves. At the car park – which is a meadow marked out by a stretched rope – a man in a high-vis vest points out where to position the front of the car. Then it’s time to walk. An 80-metre climb tackled in gear fit for a Himalayan expedition. A bend in the path, a fallen tree trunk across the way, the gap between two branches where the light filters in low and sets the leaves ablaze. There it is! This is where we all stop: at the spot we already knew about before setting off, because we’d seen it on screen, in autumns not our own, photographed by people we don’t know who, in turn, had seen it on someone else’s profile. We’ve climbed all the way up here to check that the woodland looks like the one we’d ‘liked’ on Instagram. And so that we, too, can prove – by posting as soon as there’s a signal – that we’ve been there.

Ansel Adams referred to the photographer’s ability to visualise the finished image before taking the shot as ‘previsualisation’: the print already existed in his mind whilst he was setting up his tripod. A true art form. Today, previsualisation is a free public service, delivered via an app: we know exactly what the beech forest will look like, at what time, and with what level of saturation. And the car journey is the physical replica of a journey already undertaken whilst sitting still on the sofa, between a scroll and a swipe.

In 1954, when people still ‘posted’ letters with paper and stamps, Walker Percy wrote in his essay ‘The Loss of the Creature’ that the tourist at the Grand Canyon has lost the chance to truly see the Grand Canyon, because the chasm before them is constantly being compared with the image they brought with them from home. The visit is a success when the canyon behaves itself and looks like itself. But if a stray cloud spoils the light, the tourist feels robbed of something to which they were entitled. The same logic applies to our photographs of autumn foliage. These images serve as proof of presence: they demonstrate that we were there, that we performed the seasonal ritual recognised on social media. From this stems a phenomenon we might call ‘the anti-Stendhal effect’. In Florence, in 1817, an excess of beauty caused the writer to suffer palpitations and vertigo. For us, in the beech wood, the opposite happens: a numbness born of recognition. We arrive, we look, we snap a photo. And so we feel the lukewarm satisfaction one feels in a hotel when the breakfast matches the photos on Booking.com.

Meanwhile, the crowd seeking uniqueness produces an endless archive of minute variations – millions of snaps that differ by three steps further on and two stops of exposure, depending on the quality of the smartphone. Aesthetic performance anxiety demands conformity. The imperative is to capture the right image—the one that is identical to all the others. The only permitted variation is the wide-angle shot that lays the scene bare—the queue of thirty people with their phones held aloft in front of the same three golden larch trees. For a few years, it was a small moral victory; then the irony of the ritual became part of the ritual itself and turned into a fixed stage in it.

There are peak season maps, bulletins, weekly forecasts, articles explaining ‘where to go and when’, and groups where people discuss whether the Cansiglio Forest will already be ablaze with colour this weekend or still green. A woodland that has been shedding its leaves for a few million years is scheduled like a festival, with an opening and closing date. Thus, the autumn walk takes on a historically unprecedented possibility: failure. “We went at the wrong weekend.” And where failure is possible, success becomes an achievement – that is, something worth demonstrating. The bulletin creates the performance.

In La Repubblica, Gabriele Romagnoli recounted a New Year’s Eve in Norway, hunting for the Northern Lights using apps that indicate where they are most likely to appear, and convoys of travellers setting off every evening towards the designated spots. On the night he arrived at his destination, delayed by ice on the road, the aurora had already faded. At that point, a Spaniard in the group realised that his phone’s camera lens was capturing colours invisible to the naked eye: he photographed an aurora that was no longer there, posted it online, and within minutes everyone else was doing the same. Romagnoli derives a formula from this that holds up very well even in a beech forest: reality as a ‘negligible imperfection of desire’. Silvia Camporesi confirms that the aurora is the extreme case. In her book Una foto è una foto è una foto, published by Einaudi last year, the Forlì-based photographer recounts a friend’s return from the far north: when asked what it was like, the friend replied that it looked more beautiful in photos. In real life, the aurora is often a delicate, almost imperceptible phenomenon, which the automatic settings of a smartphone inflate with contrast. By constantly seeing oversaturated images, we convince ourselves that the real aurora is exactly like that, and when we finally find ourselves face to face with it, we fail to recognise it. Camporesi gives the example of a starry sky, which the software illuminates with a brightness that doesn’t actually exist because it is programmed to make every shot look good at any cost. Today, she observes, it is almost impossible to take a bad photograph, because the phone does the thinking for us. The same applies in the woods. Computational photography interprets light rather than merely recording it: it lifts the shadows, saturates the reds, and applies the colour palette we’ve already seen elsewhere. The phone has learnt our own way of visualising the scene and carries it out. So even the bad weekend – the one the weather forecast had taught us to dread – has found a remedy in post-production: as long as the leaves are just turning yellow, the sensor (or an edit, with or without AI) will take care of bringing them to full colour. We return home with the ‘correct’ image of a mediocre day, and it ends up in the shared archive, where it fuels the expectations of those who will set off next year to see for themselves.

In truth, October and November represented a commercial lull. The summer tourist season is over, the Christmas one has not yet begun, and mountain hotels are waiting for snow that arrives later and later—if it arrives at all. Autumn foliage is the perfect stopgap. Halloween has also taken its place on the calendar—another imported phenomenon and, above all, another festival of decay. Both leaves and pumpkins decay in a visually appealing manner. 31 October and the peak of autumn foliage coincide on the same weekend, and—upon reflection—they market the same concept: death made cute. A Martian anthropologist would conclude that Italians celebrate autumn with two synchronised rituals, both of which have arrived from America over the last thirty years to celebrate decay.

Underlying all this is a botanical fact that we rarely mention, perhaps because it would spoil the atmosphere. The yellow and orange had already been there for months: carotenoids present in the leaf throughout the summer, masked by the green, which are revealed when the tree withdraws its chlorophyll and begins to break down the leaf to reabsorb its nitrogen. Red is another story altogether. The anthocyanins weren’t there to begin with: the tree synthesises them as the leaf dies, expending energy on a new pigment, produced during its final moments, in tissue that will be on the ground within three weeks. We flock en masse to capture this programmed senescence – how marvellous!

This may explain why the intensity is growing right now. The peak shifts from year to year, autumns are getting shorter, and torrential rain brings autumn on early and washes out the colours. We tend to photograph the things we are beginning to miss with greater insistence.

There remains the objection that absolves everyone by blaming mobile phones: it wasn’t like that before; people used to go into the woods simply for the sake of it. To pick mushrooms, for instance. Well, that’s not the case.

In 1965, the Bennington Banner, a Vermont daily newspaper, published a column entitled ‘Thoughts of a Leaf Peeper’. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this is the first recorded instance in print of the expression ‘leaf peeper’, meaning a leaf-watcher, which probably evolved from ‘leaf peeker’, a term already in use in Vermont around 1900. In the same issue of the newspaper, a few pages further on, there was an editorial about the traffic caused by autumn colour hunters, featuring a report from an annoyed local resident who had displayed a sign on their car reading: “Tourists Go Home!”. The battle against Airbnb-fuelled overtourism is nothing new.

The sign, meanwhile, has become a by-law. In Pomfret, Vermont, a few kilometres from Woodstock, a dirt track called Cloudland Road runs past Sleepy Hollow Farm: a late 18th-century farmhouse, two large barns, and a hill that catches the light perfectly. It is the most photographed private property in the state. Since 2023, the municipalities of Pomfret and Woodstock have closed the road to non-residents for the entire duration of the peak season, using barriers, signs and deputy sheriffs funded in part by a neighbourhood fundraising campaign called ‘Save Cloudland Road’. The official reason given is that emergency vehicles could no longer get through. The real reason is that hundreds of people a day were flouting the access ban to pose for photos, and that the hashtag dedicated to the farm had exceeded 800,000 views on TikTok.

We also needed the right word, of course. ‘Fogliame’ brings to mind a rake and cannot be registered as a trademark. ‘Senescenza fogliare’, the scientific term describing the ageing and colour change of leaves before they fall, is about as sexy as a teapot. ‘Muta autunnale’ smacks of a Labrador shedding hair on the sofa. So here comes the exotic ‘foliage’, with its air of foreignness. But there are two small linguistic pitfalls. Firstly: ‘foliage’ is not French and is not pronounced like ‘fromage’, even though almost everyone who writes it pronounces it that way. It is an Anglicism, which Italian has redefined in its own way. Secondly: the first Italian dictionary to include the term is the 2017 Zingarelli, but its history dates back to the fifteenth century, within a heraldic office. The Middle English Dictionary records ‘foilage’ with an attestation dating from around 1447, found in a letter from Lincolnshire, where the word refers to a depiction of leaves and branches used as an ornamental border on a coat of arms. A decoration, then, a framing motif designed to fill the space around the important things. Five and a half centuries later, ‘foliage’ has returned to its original purpose: the colourful frame around the subject – which, after all, is us.

The oldest precedent is Japanese and is called momijigari, the hunt for red leaves, practised since the Heian period: a thousand years of poetry and court calendars. The Western origin, on the other hand, can be dated precisely: October 1862, when the Atlantic Monthly published Henry David Thoreau’s “Autumnal Tints”. Here it is noted, with typically American self-satisfaction, that Europeans arriving in America are struck by the brilliance of the autumn foliage, and that there is no trace of a similar phenomenon in English poetry because the trees there take on few vivid colours. Thoreau then laments that the autumnal transformation of the woods has not yet left a deep mark on American literature. Who knows what he would make of today’s phone-in-hand excursions and the myriad related tourist events.

In fact, it didn’t take long for commercialisation to catch on. In 1877, a hotel in the Catskills advertised its beautiful autumn foliage, and a few years later a Connecticut newspaper reported on the success of a train trip organised to view the colours. Then things really took off. In 1971, Columbus Day became a federal bank holiday falling on a Monday, and the three-day weekend coincided with the peak of the colours: the ‘Super Bowl’ of leaf-peeping. In 1978, Vermont began issuing the first official foliage reports to newspapers and magazines: the woodland became a programme schedule. In 1986, the Foliage Hotline was launched, operated by eight telephone operators. In Italy, the pace of change has been staggering: what took 120 years in the United States has happened here between 2015 and the present day. We have imported the phenomenon along with its marketing – the whole package ready-made, like a fitted kitchen.

Next Sunday we will once again find ourselves queuing on the country road or stuck in the same spot on the footpath, taking what will be the millionth photograph of a forest that is dying rather well.