Issue 014 · Spotlight
Three young men at a blue-felt pool table in a dim Hanoi billiards hall; the central player in a black-and-gold patterned shirt leans into his shot while a man in a blue sleeveless vest watches from the left, and a foreground hand and cue enter from the lower right — Antonio di Vico

Slow Rooms — Antonio di Vico in Hanoi

Antonio di Vico moves through Hanoi at close range, finding the city in the rooms where its days unwind — pool halls trailing cigarette smoke, chess played on a weathered bench, a tattooed back turned toward a wall of old bodybuilding posters.

July 2026 · By Jack Ross

This issue belongs to the rooms you pass without entering — the pool hall with its industrial ceiling, the corner where two men have been playing chess since morning, the backstreet gym where the equipment outlasted the decade it came from. Antonio di Vico knows these rooms. He goes inside.

Di Vico is Italian, based in Maddaloni, and has spent much of his adult life in motion — fifteen years in communications for United Nations agencies, living in Australia, Thailand, Georgia, Germany, and Austria. He is known as Vagaboots. His first book, Tutta la polvere dell'India, documents an 1,800-kilometer walk across India from Dharamsala to Mumbai, sleeping in temples and roadside service stations. The photographs in this issue were made in Hanoi: a different country, the same instinct.

If this is your first Streets & Stories, welcome — every issue puts a single photographer's work at the center and lets the images do most of the talking. If you've been here before, thank you for reading.

Antonio di Vico in Hanoi

Antonio di Vico came to photography sideways, through a life spent moving. The years with UN agencies took him across continents at a pace that rewired how he looked at the world — you learn to notice when you know you're leaving. By the time he left institutional work to walk across India with a pack and a camera, the photographic instinct was already formed. What the India project gave him was permission to slow down even further, to stay in a place until it opened.

The Hanoi pool-hall photograph makes clear how he works. He is not watching from a doorway — he is at the table. A foreground hand and cue enter from the lower right of the frame; he has positioned himself close enough that the felt, the cue ball, and the bodies of the other players are all inside the same shot. The young man in the patterned shirt leans into his shot. The man in the blue Aprecia vest watches from the left. The industrial ceiling, hung with cables, seals the room from daylight.

My aim is to document an authentic world beyond stereotypes and romanticized narratives.

— Antonio di Vico

Two other photographs work in the same register of intimacy. In one, a pair of elderly men play xiangqi on a worn wooden board balanced on a table, their hands filling most of the frame. One finger points, one lifts a piece. A glass of something amber sits at the edge. The blue bench behind them is cracked and faded. The other photograph is of a man seated alone in a gym, his back to us: a full back tattoo of interlocking figures, and above him on the wall, a collage of Western bodybuilding posters — decades old, their colors going pink. The contrast is not ironic. It is just there.

The two outdoor photographs shift the key. On a Hanoi street corner, a vendor moves through the frame carrying long bamboo poles balanced across her shoulders, the poles angling past a parked cyclo and a stack of red conical hats, Vietnamese flags in the background — the whole frame in motion, everyone moving. Then the flower stall: a young woman holds a small hand mirror and checks her face among buckets of roses, red and pink and peach, yellow lilies at her side. In the foreground, an older figure in a nón lá hat and mask passes through, slightly out of focus. The woman is still. The city moves around her.

Di Vico's Instagram is @iamvagaboots. His current large-scale project will take him across six to eight thousand kilometers of India by local transport and hitchhiking — a continuation of the documentary practice he began on foot in 2023.

Links worth your time

More from Antonio di Vico’s Hanoi

A man in a black T-shirt reaches up to adjust an enormous red Vietnamese flag with a yellow star hanging over an Old Quarter street — Antonio di Vico
Framed through a bicycle wheel's spokes, a man in a striped shirt sits watching against a weathered yellow wall hung with goods — Antonio di Vico
Women in white and a vivid red ao dai pose along a narrow, sunlit passage between weathered ochre walls — Antonio di Vico
Silhouetted spectators watch pink fireworks burst over a riverfront skyline and lit high-rise on a hazy night — Antonio di Vico
A nighttime crowd with umbrellas lines a rain-slicked riverbank watching orange fireworks explode above the illuminated city skyline and bridge — Antonio di Vico
Night crowds in rain ponchos watch red fireworks bloom over a river beside a lit cable-stayed bridge and city towers — Antonio di Vico
Sunlight rakes across a large red silk parasol as a bespectacled woman smiles and a man works in the shadowed background — Antonio di Vico
Two shirtless men get head and foot massages in reclining chairs at a bright yellow-lit night-market stall strung with pennant flags — Antonio di Vico
A man with an elaborate full-back tattoo sits shirtless facing walls of bodybuilder posters in a worn green-turf weight gym — Antonio di Vico
A shirtless man presses two loaded dumbbells overhead on a bench below faded Mr. Olympia bodybuilder posters in a tin-roofed gym — Antonio di Vico
A phone-scrolling woman in a brown apron crosses a cramped Hanoi street-food kitchen as two elderly women eat at a red table — Antonio di Vico
An empty tiled pho shop with a marble spiral staircase, wall fans, stacked bowls, and a framed portrait of a woman — Antonio di Vico
A solemn boy in a beige shirt stands amid stacked egg trays, ripe bananas, and striped watermelons in a dim grocery stall — Antonio di Vico
An older man in striped pajamas on a crutch smokes beside a Truc Bach beer bar where shirtless young men sit on green stools — Antonio di Vico
Young men in a dim pool hall lean over glowing blue-felt billiard tables under hanging lamps, one in bright blue walking off — Antonio di Vico
A silver-haired man in a gold-patterned shirt lines up a shot on blue felt as a capped man in a Sports jersey watches — Antonio di Vico
A grey-haired man with a cigarette in his lips stretches across a blue table to strike a yellow ball in a dim pool hall — Antonio di Vico
A silver-haired player sights low along his cue at a yellow ball while a tattooed man in a cropped white shirt looks on — Antonio di Vico
A camouflage-clad man in a helmet steadies a towering pyramid of water-filled plastic bags packed with orange and black goldfish on a Hanoi street — Antonio di Vico
A woman in a pale blue jacket smokes at a wooden-paneled cafe beneath a framed Bee Gees portrait, a wall fan, and a glowing fish tank — Antonio di Vico
A silhouetted spectator watches a giant outdoor LED screen showing muzzled police dogs marching beside green-uniformed handlers above red and white stage lights — Antonio di Vico
A cyclo driver in a green pith helmet and a porter shouldering bamboo ladders cross a flag-draped Hanoi corner by Banh Mi Long Hoi, with stacked conical hats — Antonio di Vico
Weathered hands of two elderly men reach over a worn wooden Chinese chess board, one holding a lit cigarette, beside a glass of tea outdoors — Antonio di Vico
A bespectacled man pauses beneath dense red Vietnamese flag bunting in a busy market street, his companion reflected in a scooter's side mirror — Antonio di Vico
A boy in a yellow shirt and red shorts runs past a carved stone dragon balustrade as another child in green climbs it and a woman rests nearby — Antonio di Vico
Two older men rest on a cyclo beneath a dazzling canopy of red Vietnamese and Communist Party flags against blue sky — Antonio di Vico
A woman in a conical hat and blue jacket unloads dark green watermelons from a truck onto straw as another vendor works under an orange tarp — Antonio di Vico
Dense schools of orange, white, and black goldfish crowd a market tank as aerator bubbles stream up through the pink-tinged water — Antonio di Vico
A young woman in a white ao dai holds a small national flag beneath a thick red flag canopy as a silver Lexus and families pass on the festive street — Antonio di Vico
Ornamental koi and fancy goldfish in reds, oranges, and translucent white drift through a dark aquarium, flowing fins trailing — Antonio di Vico
A masked woman in a conical hat sits amid a crowded souvenir stall behind a curtain of dangling miniature painted hats and lanterns — Antonio di Vico
Vietnamese women in red crowd a mirrored kaleidoscope sculpture, their faces and reaching hands fractured into bright geometric reflections — Antonio di Vico
Through a dark room's window, a teal dusk sky glows over Hanoi's low rooftops and lit apartment towers — Antonio di Vico
A man in a yellow Dunlop motorbike helmet walks past a fabric shop and a wall of yellow safety helmets beside a stairwell — Antonio di Vico
A woman checks a pink hand mirror amid buckets of red, pink, and orange roses and lilies as a masked vendor in a conical hat passes — Antonio di Vico
Reflections layer a cruise boat's empty leather dining lounge over Ha Long Bay's karst islands, a headphoned crew member at left — Antonio di Vico
The contact sheet

Every issue of Streets & Stories

  1. 01One Hundred Assignments for the New York Times — Justin Mott in Hanoi
  2. 02The Last Breath of District 8 — Alexandre Garel in Saigon
  3. 03Twenty Years in Hoi An — Etienne Bossot
  4. 04A City of Contrasts — Xuan Phuong Le in Hanoi
  5. 05Seeing Clearly Is Enough — David Lund in Saigon
  6. 06White Flower Petals — Tyler Henthorn in Saigon
  7. 07What Quietly Remains — Dao Duy Duong in Hanoi
  8. 08Original Identity — Lâm Xuân Tùng in Hanoi
  9. 09A Habit of Noticing — Le Hoang Tuan in Saigon
  10. 10The Rhythm of Light
  11. 11Before the Day Begins — Pete Walls in Hội An
  12. 12Crossings — Paul Evan Green in Saigon
  13. 13On His Own Terms — Jimmy Ky in Vietnam
  14. Reading 14Slow Rooms — Antonio di Vico in Hanoi
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