I was
born in Caserta in 1947, and I lived the first 10 years of my life in
the “English Gardens” of the Palace of Caserta, in a guesthouse
Vamvitelliana where my grandparents on my Mother’s side lived. There,
between the refined artistic beauty of the palace, so immense and
particularmently different, with the park made in Italian style, that
after a series of baths and fountains, finshes with the waterfall of the
Torrione; and with the baths of Diana and Atteone, and the English
Gardens where the arcitecture of the landscape adapts to the form of the
area with great interventions, of which one is a small artificial lake
and anticipates the followings of the Romantic period, my artist spirit
was fed, as I was alone in playing and fantasizing in that fantasic
enchanted garden with trees and birds, water and fish in the lake and
the beauty of the sculptures which seemed to live in this magical place.
I would like to be able to describe completely this place because it is
that which has most influenced my character and my aethstic sense. Even
today, going back to those moments in my memories, I think those were
the most important years in my formation as an artist.
At 10
years, my parents and I went to live in Naples, a big city, without
fields or woods, with big buildings, narrow and crooked streets, densly
populated and rich in life, but strangely facing a beuatiful sea. It is
the awesome, overwhelming beauty of the nature, which manifests in
another dimension and here the look is lost in infinite spaces within
the Gulf of Naples, Mountain Vesuvius, Posillipo, Sorrento, Positano,
Almalfi Coast, Capri, Ischia and Campi Flegrei. I always asked myself
why where the nature offered such natural beauty, man brought it on
themselves to create archeticual spaces for living, while there where
the nature was very generous, man tried to destroy it.
I had 8
or 9 years when my uncle gave me a box of oil colors (I still conserve a
few tubes) and I had only 15 years when in vacation in Ischia, I brought
two of my oil paintings on paper to an art gallery. The following day,
the manager of the gallery called me to say that he had sold them to an
English man that wanted meet and talk with me. Well, this gentleman
(that I discovered was an English Shipbuilder) came to Naples and bought
all the paintings I had. From that point, began my profession of
painting. In Naples, I finished my artistic and scientific studies and
I taught unil 1991. The next year to follow, I tranfered to Rome where
I live to this day. Rome has been the third fundamental stop in my
artistic route. Because with her richness of history and art, were
nutured my spirit in the sense of “Always Beautiful,” and it influenced
my painting search pointing to the composition of works or art which
refuge from reality, and express their intimate beauty.
