PREFACE

When I was born my father was 50 years old: he had a life behind him.
But as all young people with a life in front of them, I didn’t give much importance to the past and I had the feeling Dad had always been as I had known him. When he told me about facts and people of his past I unconsciously placed them in an indefinite time without connecting them to the present.
The memory of him he left me after his death was mostly that of the painter rather than of the father and the man. When I thought about him I imagined him in his studio with his beautiful head full of white hair, his energetic and serene expression  while he painted listening to music.
Now after so many years since his death and after living my own life, time has reached a different dimension for me and his image instead of floating away in memory has grown closer to me to the point of becoming a constant presence in my life.
So as I was tidying up his works and souvenirs, in his long letters from South America and from the trench of World War I, in the small diaries filled with tiny notes about expenses, engagements and thoughts, in the old worn and yellowed photos, I found the facts and people he told me about and which had little by little shaped the man my father was. Going backwards year after year I lived through  the journey of his life again reaching a 16 year old boy who in the far away 1903 from the small town of Grugliasco went to Turin to attend the Albertina Academy because he wanted to become a painter. 

Marialuisa Arduino

complete biography