Milan Doesn’t Need a Filter

I don’t get to Italy nearly enough, which is absurd given how close it is and how consistently good it’s been to me. Venice with my parents when I was young, still astonished that people actually lived on water. Rome with a couple of friends, eating badly and walking until our feet gave out. Sicily with a woman I was genuinely convinced I’d spend the rest of my life with, somewhere under an olive tree, arguing about nothing important.

Photographer Adolfo Valente lives in Milan and recently shot a series for Apple Pie Magazine featuring Diana Kingston—model, former Playmate, and committed comics fan. A beautiful woman who loves the same nerd culture I grew up reading and also happens to look like that in a Milan apartment. I have no complaints whatsoever.

Valente shoots her in a spare, modern flat—the kind of place that feels genuinely lived-in rather than staged—and the light does exactly what Milan light does when it’s cooperating. Kingston holds her comic with the casual ease of someone who actually reads them, not as a prop but as something she brought herself. That’s the detail that makes the whole series land. It’s the difference between costume and character.