Orfeo Tamburi (Jesi 1910-Parigi 1994)

He graduated from the Cuppari Technical Institute in Jesi in 1926 and the following year worked as a decorator in a porcelain factory. Thanks to a scholarship, he settled in Rome in 1928, where he enrolled in the Art School on Via Ripetta and later in the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1935 he went to Paris for the first time where he discovered the painting of Cézanne and came into contact with some of the most important painters of the time. The same year he took part in the Quadriennale d'arte in Rome, and in 1936 he executed a fresco entitled Carnevale Romano in the Anagrafe building. In the same year he exhibited for the first time at the Venice Biennale, and in the summer he met Curzio Malaparte, with whom he became friends and edited the Tuscan writer's magazine Prospettive, illustrating his works. In the following years he continued to participate in the Rome Quadrennial and the Venice Biennale while setting up solo exhibitions in Italy. At the end of World War II he exhibited in Paris, Basel and Brussels. In 1957 he was in the United States as a special correspondent for the New York magazine Fortune, commissioned to portray some American cities; in the same year he exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Landau Gallery in Los Angeles. Returning to Europe, he resumed traveling, visiting London for the first time (1961) and then traveling to Greece and Austria: at the same time he set up a substantial number of exhibitions in major Italian cities. In 1963-64 he exhibited at the exhibition “Peintures italiennes d'aujourd'hui,” organized in the Middle East and North Africa. In 1971 he received the first-class gold medal for cultural merit from the president of the Republic and in 1975 the Città Eterna international prize in Rome. In the last decade of his life he thinned out his travels, but continued to capture in them impressions and images for his canvas and paper itineraries.