"These are not unwanted prints," explained his son Simone. "The truth is that my father did not show nor publish what he held the closest to his heart. He saved it for himself, in fear that people may not understand it.

In 1963, he wanted to stop completely; he was upset with the work he was creating. One night, he destroyed his prints and threw them in the garbage. As a child, I used to model for him... or rather it was my moving silhouette because I could never sit still.

There was the release of the Italian translation of the novel Seagull by the American author Richard Bach in 1983, and he asked me what I thought about it. He then began to work on a series of seagulls that nearly cost him his life. One day he was photographing them underneath a loading dock when he fell into a rancid-smelling pit. What saved him was his tripod, but the smell remained for a solid week afterwards. Poetry is what brought him inspiration, and in fact he despised scientific descriptions. "The Dapple-grey mare" by Giovanni Pascoli slowly pulled him further away.

Yes, he had an abstract spirit. He saw the scars, he saw the signs."

"I want to enter into things. I believe in abstraction in a way where it permits me to bring myself closer to reality." Mario Giacomelli