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1950
fresco
350 x 1200 cm
Guesthouse of the mines
Monteponi (Iglesias), Sardinia

The artist executed this large wall painting, an act of homage to a tradition of work in the mining area of Sardinia, for the guest quarters at Monteponi. The work also fits into the program of new public art that marked the Italian Realist movement around 1950.
The fresco depicts, in an epic narrative progression, a sunny Mediterranean landscape animated by mythical, timeless figures, and a landscape transformed by modern industry, which mechanizes men and work even underground. A work of this kind can be considered a forerunner of analogous mural projects of the Fifties: for example, by Aldo Borgonzoni in the Camera del Lavoro in Medicina, in the province of Bologna, and by Armando Pizzinato in the Sala Consiliare of the Provincial Administration of Parma.