Giovanni Colacicchi Biography
Giovanni Colacicchi (Anagni, 19 January 1900 – Florence, 27 December 1992) was an Italian painter. Born to a noble family, son of Roberto, landowner, and Pia Vannutelli, descendant of the painter Scipione Vannutelli, he spent much of his childhood between Rome and Florence, until the conclusion of his high school studies, then settling definitively in Florence at the end of the first world War. In 1919 he began his artistic career as a painter as a pupil of Francesco Franchetti. Thanks to his teacher he began to frequent the artistic and cultural circles of the city. He was among the founders of the cultural magazines Rivista di Firenze (in 1924 together with Giorgio de Chirico and Alberto Savinio) and Solaria (in 1926, together with Eugenio Montale, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Carlo Emilio Gadda and Italo Svevo). In 1924 he married Amalia Zanotti, from a noble family originally from Biella, who then moved to Calabria with her family, who introduced him to the Calabrian territory of the Costa dei Gelsomini, between Locri and Roccella Jonica, which became a source of inspiration for many of his works. In 1930 he set up his first solo exhibition, in the Saletta Fantini gallery in Florence. He made several trips to Italy from Venice to Calabria, to Paris where he spent a long period of life, up to South Africa in 1935, driven by the desire to visit distant and exotic places and to overcome the pain of separation from his wife . Having returned to Italy, in 1937 he had his first son Piero and in 1942 his second son Francesco with Flavia Arlotta (painter, originally from Sorrento), who he then married in 1952. He moved for a certain period to Rome with his new family, and worked in Renato Guttuso's studio. During the war, influenced by the turmoil of the time, he joined the Action Party. After the war he became interested in art theory, forming discussion groups with intellectuals and artists of the time such as Onofrio Martinelli. From the mid-seventies, with the re-evaluation of national art criticism of the first half of the twentieth century, Colacicchi also became known and his contribution to his artistic and cultural work was re-evaluated.
