became my friends, even though they were much older than I was, because we shared a similar outlook on life.
I spent the first year and a half in the mountains, where I recovered by taking medicines were prescribed at the time. Few people were close to me; the younger ones disappeared. I understood how inhuman the world and people could be; once you leave the mechanisms of society, you are quickly forgotten. Only true friends stick by you.
At fifteen, I experienced the devastation of old age. I realized that when one is old it is as if he or she was sick. My illness made me feel as if I were different, I felt as if people were afraid of being around me.
Music, painting and writing were not only a necessity for me, but they were also a refuge. Books would never betray me. Like Montaigne, I would caress them on the shelves of my library and bring suitcases full of them to the mountains. The illness helped me, it increased the sense of isolation that until then had not surfaced. During those years, I began painting under Pietro Servalli’s guidance. Although both Gregorio Sciltian, the painter, and Marco Valsecchi, the critic, admired my figurative paintings, I soon went on to abstract art.In 1964, I exhibited at the Flaviana Gallery in Locarno and at the Kasper Gallery in Lausanne.
Approximately twenty more exhibits followed, among them one at the Cavallino Gallery in Venice in 1965, one in Brussels and one in Paris at the Galerie Riquelme in 1967. In Milan, at the Cavour Art Gallery, I met Scheiwiller, who in 1968 prepared a monograph for the series ‘Il Quadrato’. It was a booklet ‘All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro’, prefaced by Alberto Sartoris, the critic and architect.
More exhibits followed in America, Brazil and Japan. While I was preparing a series of ten exhibits in the States with Alan Solomon, Giulio Carlo Argan was in Rome writing for a monography to be published in the Fratelli Pozzo Art Editions".

Translated by Marco Praderio