Post number 600: Tuscany

.

Yesterday at home I noticed Andrew reading a delicious looking old book 

(delicious, as in having enourmous photo attraction for me), which turned out to 

be a copy of Dante's La Divina Commedia, Vol. I, Inferno.  When Andrew was a 

kid, his family spent a few years in Florence, Tuscany, where his professor father 

was researching Dante. They lived in a villa, just outside Florence, which belongs 

to a Colacicchi family. A few years ago I had the privilege of visiting the villa with 

Andrew, and met the matriarch of the family, artist Flavia Arlotta Colacicchi, and 

her son, Piero Colacicchi. Flavia's husband, artist Giovanni Colacicchi passed away 

in 1992.

Here's a quote from a 2004 book 'Tuscany Artists Garden' (isbn 0-500-511950):

"Flavia Arlotta Colacicchi has lived in this ancient villa just outside Florence for sixty years. Born in 

Sorrento, in a large villa overlooking the sea, she moved to Florence because her family deemed 

it proper that the family move to a city that was considered civil, spiritual and artistic.

The longing for the open spaces of her childhood explains her desire to find a garden where she 

can be in contact with nature and spend time with her husband and children. The thirteenth 

century building, where roses and plumbago grow, was a former nunnery donated by the Medici 

family after they detached it from the neighbouring villa Petraia. The stone-paved forecourt and a 

small rose clad terrace are traces of an old pre-existing garden. An Italian parterre, inspired by 

classical gardens, was added. The garden is divided into three parts, featuring: lanes leading to 

stone benches that face the gallery; boxwood hedges containing antique roses brought from her 

mother's garden that today, after one hundred years, still fill the square with a profusion of 

blossoms; a long tunnel pergola, supported by an iron frame, which takes one to a collection of 

roses shaded by tall lime trees.

The family used to gather here to admire the breathtaking scenery of Florence and the verdant 

Sesto gallery. However, that green plain no longer exists and urban expansion has filled every 

corner, leaving only a narrow strip of vegetation: a small green lung that Flavia hopes will resist 

to enable this chaotic suburb of the city to breathe."

Andrew's notes.

From Andrew's library.

Giovanni Colacicchi, 1991, at home.

Colacicchi garden: The greenhouse.
On the left an old studio where Flavia and Giovanny used to paint.
From the book Tuscany Artists Gardens.

Giovanni and Flavia Arlotta Colacicchi, Baden Baden, 1934.

From Andrew's library.

A marble tub and a bas-relief shaded by an old fig tree can be found in front of the house's storage area.

These pieces originate from the nearby villa of Petraia that once belonged to the Medici family.

From the book Tuscany Artists Gardens.

From Andrew's library.

Colacicchi garden, from the book Tuscany Artists Gardens.

Giovanni Colacicchi, La Martiere, 1947, and Il Martire, 1948.

From Andrew's library.

From Andrew's library.

Piero Colacicchi, a renowned Italian Roma rights advocate.

Giovanni Colacicchi:

From http://www.800artstudio.com/en/colacicchi.php

Giovanni Colacicchi

(Anagni/FR 1900 - Florence 1992)

Born into a traditional catholic family, Giovanni Colacicchi began his studies in the seminary. At the end of the first 

World War, he moved to Florence, where he studied the first Renaissance painting, devoting himself at the same 

time to poetry. Around 1919, he began to take an interest in the landscape painting, which was a favourite subject 

of the Tuscan artistic circles of the period. After 1920 he decided to concentrate only on painting. During this period 

he was well introduced in the cultural circles which frequented the Caffé delle Giubbe Rosse, where he became 

friend with Aldo Palazzeschi, Libero Andreotti, Raffaello Franchi and met his master, the painter Francesco 

Franchetti.

Through Geraldo Cepparelli, whose study in San Gimignano he frequented regularly, he met Raffaele De Grada, 

who was trying in that period to get over the Macchiaioli and Impressionist legacy working out a firm and solid 

image of the landscape, taking example from Cézanne. It was  in the Roman study of Carlo Socrate in 1921 that he 

met another fundamental artist for his development, Onofrio Martinelli, to whom he remained deeply attached for 

the rest of his life.

During these first twenties, in Florence, he dealt with the climate of the return to order also through the Plastic 

Values Collective, organized within the Florentine Primaverile of 1922; in 1926 he was among the founders of 

Solaria, magazine of art and literature. The Italian intellectual élite took part in it from Giuseppe Ungaretti to 

Eugenio Montale and Carlo Emilio Gadda, as well as the group of Tuscan artists, made up, among the others, of 

Baccio Maria Bacci, Italo Griselli, Gianni Vagnetti, Onofrio Martinelli. During the same year Colacicchi exhibited his 

works at the First Show of the Italian Novecento and, later, at the exhibitions organized by Margherita Sarfatti 

abroad.

In 1930 the Saletta Fantini of Florence presented the first personal exhibition of Colacicchi who in the same year 

painted the "Donna di Anagni" (Woman of Anagni), one of his first important works, which was presented at the first 

Roman Quadriennale. The critic Raffaello Franchi saw in it an homage to the monumentality of the Tuscan 

Quattrocento. Between 1931 and 1933 he passed long periods in Anagni, where he painted works such as "Santa 

Maria Egiziaca" (Saint Mary Egyptian) and "Giacobbe e l'Angelo" (Jacob and the angel) and in 1932 he took part in 

the Venetian Biennale with a personal hall. In the same period, getting over any remaining naturalistic 

fragmentariness and casuality, he retrieved the examples of the great Italian painting, from Giotto to Andrea del 

Castagno and Piero della Francesca.

During the autumn of 1935, following a sentimental crisis, he went to South Afrika, staying one year in Cape Town, 

where he painted works such as "Gli esuli" (The exiles), "Il faro di Mouillepoint" (The lighthouse of Mouillepoint), 

"Saldhana Bay". In 1937, in Rome, he got in touch with Libero De Libero, director of La Cometa Gallery, meeting 

point of the painters of the Roman School; the following year, he moved to the capital with his companion, Flavia 

Arlotta, and his newborn baby and held a personal show at La Cometa, which collected his recent works, among 

these some still life paintings marked by a  metaphysics atmosphere. In the same period he obtained the chair of 

Decoration at the Fine Art Academy of Florence, where he will teach until 1970. Back in Florence in 1939, he 

worked on a painting for the Law Courts of Milan and prepared a series of still life paintings which were exhibited in 

1940 at the Florentine Lyceum show, during which he met the American art historian Bernard Berenson, who he will 

frequently saw until the death of the expert in 1959.

After the war – he was a member of the Action Party – Colacicchi continued consistently his pictorial research 

founding in 1947 the group Nuovo Umanesimo, together with Oscar Gallo, Quinto Martini, Onofrio Martinelli, Ugo 

Capocchini and Emanuele Cavalli, with the intention to support, in dispute with the abstract tendencies, the 

figurativeness and the realism in painting and sculpture. In 1948 he participated for the last time in the Venetian 

Biennale with "Il martire e La martire" (The martyr). In the following years Colacicchi's artistic research continued in 

a consistent and secluded way, while his public activity got more intense, with personal shows and the realization 

of some decorative cycles, as well as with his activity of art critic for the newspaper La Nazione and of director of 

the Accademia.

Written by: Gioela Massagli - Translated by: Cristina Panigada

© Galleria d'Arte Bacci di Capaci - Lucca - Italy

Villa Petraia.