Read the story
Turn these paintings over and they start talking. A gallery stamp from Ferrara. A typed label from the hills above Florence, the price still in lire. A certificate from Rome, countersigned in Cesena. A red wax seal in Parma, pressed over the painter’s own thumbprint. Read together, the backs draw a map of Italy in the years when a painting on the wall, bought with its certificate, was how a home declared its taste.
The fronts tell a second story. Three works are by Romano Mussolini, the dictator’s son who chose jazz, played with Chet Baker and Dizzy Gillespie, and painted quiet things: a bare tree, a ruined hut, a woman’s face. Eliano Fantuzzi spent fifteen years in Paris, fought in the French army and frescoed a royal palace in Saudi Arabia before painting this night scene of fishermen by lantern light. Carlo Hollesch and Eugenio Pardini both showed at the Venice Biennale. Riccardo Ghiribelli co-founded the Florentine group that exhibited Fontana and Burri, and here turns a clothespin into a portrait. Natale Filannino, a painter of the Florentine avant-garde, signs two blonde women with the glamour of a 1970s film poster.
Then the tone lightens. Giuseppe Zanni’s priests, in black cassocks and red sashes, play ball among the ruins. A rainy Paris boulevard carries a signature that sounds like a stage name.
From Bari comes a Crucifixion by Azio Speziga, dated on the back “Bari 25/10/72”. Also tied to Bari is a view of the old town, numbered 1/100, that carries a verse: the whole town wants it known that it is still alive. And a few pictures keep their secrets: a 1985 globe shows Europe built entirely of tiny pen-drawn houses, with a signature nobody has yet read.
In all, 27 works and sixteen named artists, from a single period. The fronts show the painting; the backs, with their stamps, labels and certificates, say where each picture comes from. That is why the collection is for sale as a single lot: together, these pictures are a time capsule of Italian taste, looking for a new owner who will keep it whole.
