Sixty-five years ago, in autumn 1960, I was a law university student aged 22, in the beginning of my photographic passion to narrate some pieces of various humanity. I knew I never could be able to make “great, beautiful, strong pictures” about the Circus life as a special entertainment and a romantic/exotic community of brave and skilled persons. In two sessions of few hours I tried to capture some fragments, some traces of the hard and sad life of the workers (two clowns and a woman tigers’ tamer) preparing to enter the scene, waiting their turn and just a flash about their performance. In those short sequences they look like to accept their life with resignation or self-irony. Later, in 1961 spring, I shot some scattered situations, some portraits in the backstage of the circus tent. Both in autumn and spring the Circus was in very bad conditions, surrounded by mud and located in a sad suburbs of Brescia, as visible in the pictures of tired elephants and fragile soubrettes, both “returning home” after the show. Those conditions created a fortuitous confirmation of my pictures’ mind. So I hope this is the way they (never published till now) could be appreciated. Camera: Zeiss Ikon 6x6 Ikoflex, with 120 bnw Agfa film.