When I was in elementary school, there was a history lesson on the Middle Ages in which our teacher used Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s painting Allegory and Effects of Good and Bad Government to describe the rural and urban work of that era.

I was enchanted as I watched the slides, each showing a detail of the fresco—especially the city walls, with their crenellated buildings and the workers busy constructing a roof…

The teacher was explaining the image, but I wasn’t listening — I was contemplating Beauty.

This episode is an example.

In middle school, I was very interested in learning to draw.

To me, it was like Magic… being able to recreate with my own hands an image identical to reality, or to copy without formal mistakes, or to draw from imagination—transferring my ideas from mind to paper with precision—meant possessing an immeasurable treasure.

So I chose to attend art school.

During high school, at the art school, I came across a Hollywood film that told the story of a New York artist.

The paintings used in that film were by a certain Francesco Clemente—or at least, that’s the name that appeared in the closing credits.

I looked for material on this artist in the library, and I searched the Internet too… it was the late nineties, and I found almost nothing.

They had struck me deeply for their distinctive style.

After finishing high school, I continued my studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice — not to perfect my drawing, but to learn anew. I was trying to understand the structure of things and to make them innovative. I wanted to be innovative, to create something new

Those years in Venice were very valuable: I loved observing what my classmates were painting in the studio. I didn’t become innovative, but I learned to refine my taste for Beautiful things.

I graduated with top marks with a thesis on Francesco Clemente.

Throughout my life, the vividly colorful paintings of my father have always accompanied me.

A naïve painter, he impressed me deeply since childhood with his brushstrokes loaded with oil paint — ten thousand shades and ten thousand colors, all placed together with perfect instinct.

After the Academy came my return from Venice to Montecchio Maggiore

After some time, I found a government job in an office at the Vicenza hospital. I felt like the customs officer Rousseau (a painter I greatly admire): painting became my pastime, and thus, free—because it doesn’t feed me, it can afford far fewer compromises (within the bounds of common sense).