I was born and lived the first twenty years of my life in a white town in Salento, surrounded by the green of the olive trees, between stone walls that mark the boundaries of a red earth that seems burnt by the sun, yet is rich and fertile. The sequence of forms and colours that change with the seasons, in a landscape inhabited by faces that bear the signs of hard work in the fields, awoke in me the impulse to portray figures and settings, fixing them on the canvas beyond time and space. 

In my early years at school, my love of drawing was also encouraged by the task of reproducing on the blackboard the drawings proposed by my teacher who, because of illness, was confined to a wheelchair. To satisfy my unceasing desire for drawing, in the Forties my mother cut her long black hair and exchanged it for a box of six coloured pencils of which I still have a vivid memory. 

 One day when I was about ten, I drew a butterfly in pencil on a page of an exercise book, repeating it several times with the wings in different positions on the same slender insect body, creating an impression of movement. I was convinced I had found a new way of representing things and I ran to tell my mother who tried to understand me, without really succeeding. It was wartime, there were no cartoons or television, and I thought I had discovered “movement”. Later, when I arrived in my adopted town of Padua at the age of twenty, I was terribly disappointed to find the Futurism of Depero. 

My first real approach to painting dates back to my adolescence, when I used clayey ochre on canvas to depict an image of Christ and the compassionate gesture of Magdalene as she wiped his face. Over the years I have tried to renew the motivations and expressions of my painting, with the desire to arouse emotions and reflections. When I finally arrived at the extreme synthesis of the human body, transforming it into architectural elements, I felt I had at last really discovered the pictorial world that is in tune with my personality and in which I recognise myself.