ISAIA FW26 | TO THOSE WHO COME AFTER

Hotels are strange places. For a few days, a room is yours. You leave your clothes on a chair, your book by the bed, perhaps order the same coffee every morning. You begin to behave as if you lived there. You don’t. Someone was there before you. Someone will be there after. At the Excelsior Vittoria, this has been happening for almost two centuries. Most guests left behind a name in a register, a forgotten tie, perhaps an unpaid drink. A few left something more. Caruso was one of them. Lucio Dalla, much later, was another. Different men, different times, the same sea outside the window. To Those Who Come After begins with this simple thought: Some things move through time by passing from one person to another. In the film, one of those things is carried inside a red case. It travels through the hotel, changing hands, rooms and temporary owners. Nobody keeps it for very long. That is the point. Because inheritance is a curious thing. We like to think of it as something we receive. But receiving is only half the job. The other half is deciding what to do with it before passing it on. And so the case continues its journey, until another door opens, another guest arrives, and another pair of hands finds the piano. What happens next is not ours to say. It belongs to those who come after. Shot at the Grand Hotel Excelsior Vittoria in Sorrento, To Those Who Come After is a reflection on inheritance, belonging and the traces we leave behind. More than a setting, the hotel becomes