ABSTRACT
I was maybe seven or eight years old when I took my first visit to the National Gallery of Parma located in the majestic Palazzo della Pilotta, accompanied by my father and my older sister. Of that visit I remember, amongst the exhibited works that most greatly impressed me, two Roman sculptures of the first or second century; to me they were colossal. Made of basanite and representing Dionisus and Hercules, they had once stood in the Orti Farnesiani on the Palatine in Rome. Besides the gigantic black stone sculptures, the sight of a formidable painting by Canaletto has remained in my memory. In reality I had memorized that painting because my father had explained to me that it was a painting of a city, to me then only known by a name, with streets made of water: Venice. He explained to me also that that view of Venice however
didn’t really exist in Venice, but only in the imagination of the painter who had composed it, in an actual spot, with real buildings from other places or only imagined by an extraordinary architect by the very classical nickname of Palladio.
