a) "SSN75 BIS CENTRALE UMBRA"

b) "SSN79 TERNANA"

both exemplary Artist Proof, inscribed in pencil on the lower left: P. d'A. and signed lower right: Diego Pettinelli

Diego Pettinelli, pupil and son-in-law of Adolfo De Carolis and trained at the prestigious School of the Book of Urbino, in his career he devoted ample space to woodcut. The oldest of the engraving techniques, woodcut (or wood engraving), however, has had a discontinuous history. In Italy, its staunch defender was De Carolis who, in the first decades of the 20th century, brought it back to the fore and earned it important admirers such as Gabriele D'Annunzio. Pettinelli, one of De Carolis' closest pupils, maintained over the years an unchanged passion for woodcut and the prints offered here show his stylistic evolution and growing mastery of the medium and technical expertise.

Thus we pass from the two small but detailed woodcuts of views of places along the State Roads, the backbone of provincial Italy and renumbered in 1928, to the woodcut with the Bathers , which reflects the twentieth century taste in the volumes of the figures. Finally, it closes with the later Roman Landscape in which all the manual skills of Pettinelli and his delicate atmospheric rendering are displayed.