"Let us hope that these dark days will be followed by better ones. I work, but these continual worries are extremely tiring, believe me. I should like to see you again.."

“When most Italian artists of my own generation were afraid to be too 'modern,' too 'international' in their style, not 'national' or 'imperial' enough, I was still left in peace, perhaps because I demanded so little recognition. My privacy was thus my protection and, in the eyes of the Grand Inquisitors of Italian art, I remained a provincial professor of etching, at the Fine Art Academy in Bologna.”

“Among the ancient painters, the Tuscan's are the ones that interest me more: above all Giotto and Massacio . Of the modern painters I think that Corot, Courbet, Fattori, and Cezanne are the most legitimate heirs to the glorious Italian tradition.”

“A white bottle is all that remain.”

“Perhaps I will have photographs taken of the still life with the round table and of the other with oranges and the furniture behind.”

“I am now working on a still life with a bottle and other objects spread out on a plane and it seems to be turning out well.”

“..my own paintings of that period remain pure still-life compositions and never suggest any metaphysical, surrealist, psychological, or literary considerations at all . My milliners' dummies, for instance, are objects like others and have not been selected to suggest symbolic representations of human beings of legendary or mythological characters. The only titles that I chose for these paintings were conventional, like 'Still Life, Flowers or Landscape', without any implications of strangeness of an unreal world .”