UPCOMING EXHIBITION: INNER GARDENS. FLAVIA ARLOTTA

From 13 September to 16 December 2025, twentieth-century adoptive Florentine artist Flavia Arlotta will be featured in the show 'Inner Gardens: Still-lifes and Landscapes by Flavia Arlotta' at Il Palmerino Cultural Association.

An interview with Francesco Colacicchi and Alta Macadam

By Linda Falcone

This article was first published in Restoration Conversations

magazine, Issue 7 - Spring 2025

Walking up the wide but wooded path, to the Colacicchi house on via dell’Osservatorio, was my first taste of Spring this year. It was also the closest I will ever get to fulfilling a childhood dream: to be able to step inside a painting and into another world. Francesco Colacicchi and his wife, author Alta Macadam, opened their home for this interview, and to discuss, with curator Federica Parretti and myself, the September 2025 show at Il Palmerino, featuring Francesco’s mother, painter Flavia Arlotta, co-organised by Il Palmerino Cultural Association and Calliope Arts Foundation, in collaboration with the British Institute of Florence.

Flavia Arlotta, Still Life with Red Ribbon, 1936 c.

Francesco is a painter, like his mother Flavia, and his father Giovanni Colacicchi, an artist who achieved considerable acclaim in Italy’s largely unexplored Novecento period. To say the family home is a wunderkammer (or cabinet of wonders) is an understatement. Its shells, bottles, baubles, cups, rocks and glassware all seem to have their painted alter egos, and the walls are hung with works by all three of the family’s artists, that tease the visitor by mirroring the world outside the frame. “It took me a moment to make the house my own,” Alta admitted – “but what a home it is!”

Francesco works by the window in a sunlit corner of the room, “where I feel good”, he says. He produces zen-like still-life works, that are properly described in these liberally translated words by Maria Cristina François: “In your paintings, I breathe air, poetry, solitude and light. I feel better, and wish I never had to leave them. I’d like to stay inside them, and find myself, as if by some spell, painted too.”

Restoration Conversations: “You learned the rudiments of painting from both your mother and father. How would you describe Flavia’s work?”

Francesco Colacicchi: “My mother’s painting is linked to the home sphere, like many still-life artists, and the objects she collected are a symbol of her way of being. Often, my mother would choose a corner of the house, set a scene and paint it, but her objects seemed to fit, and looked like they had always been there; they never looked like arrangements. She learned how to use colour from my father, but the way she saw the world was entirely different. My parents’ use of light is one example. No other twentieth-century painter had my father’s ability to capture light and shadow at a precise moment in time, or ‘recorded’ light quite like he did. The light in my mother’s painting is beautiful, as if it comes from the inside – an inner light.”

RC: “Flavia graduated from Florence’s Accademia delle Belle Arti in 1935, and participated in a number of collective exhibitions, including shows at Palazzo Strozzi and the Galleria dell’Arte Moderna in Rome. Her Girl in a White Dress is part of the Gallery of Modern Art’s collection at the Pitti Palace. What can you tell us about your mother’s portraiture?”

Flavia Arlotta, Still Life with Porcelain Cup, 1960s

FC: “Flavia was very good at understanding people’s psychology, and created wonderful portraits because of it. To make a good portrait, you have to understand the personality of the person being painted, and perhaps my mother was better at it than my father, who tended to focus more on the task’s formal or classic elements. My mother knew how to put the sitter at ease, and their dialogue was completely different. Unfortunately, here at home, we only have a little one – a portrait of a girl – because, normally, portraits were sold to the sitter. In Mother’s Little Girl in a Red Coat – who was probably 11 or 12 years old at the most – the sitter is approaching the brink of womanhood. Her attitude, the placement of her hand… her slightly pouty mouth – it’s a masterpiece of psychology.”

RC: “Flavia wrote a war-diary memoir entitled Ricordi, published in 2013, after her death. During the war, your family spent time in Valombrosa, guests of Nicky Mariano and Bernard Berenson, and later moved to via Marignolle, on the edge of Florence. Tell us about Flavia during the war years.”

FC: “In 1944, Florence lived through what was called ‘The Emergency’. The Allies arrived, the English and American troops, to free us from nazi-fascism, coming up from Sicily, and fortunately, the Germans fled north. In August, the front passed through Florence, and that period was the Emergenza. Only women could leave the house. Our whole family – I was two years old and my older brother Piero was five – lived as refugees, inside the Accademia delle Belle Arti. My father’s candidacy for directorship there would have to be approved by the Allies later. That building seemed the safest of all places, to my parents and other artists and professors with families in tow. In fact, it was. At least it was not bombed.”

Flavia Arlotta, Little Girl in a Red Coat, 1979

RC: “But your family home was bombed – this house, in via dell’Osservatorio?”

FC: “Yes, because the partisans informed the English and American troops that there were enemy ammunition trucks in the neighbourhood, near Villa della Petraia. They found no trucks here, but saw the house, thought ‘maybe that’s the place’, and bombed it. The first time it happened, my mother was here, down in the cellar. When she heard the explosions and understood what was happening, she said, ‘I don’t want to die under the rubble’, and went out into the garden, where a bomb dropped no more than a few meters from her, ‘like it was falling on my head’, she said. But several days later, she came back again, on foot from Piazza San Marco, with a wheel barrow, determined to find us something to eat. She found the house in ruins, but its main walls were upright. Ultimately, my parents spent their whole lives trying to rebuild the house, but a part of it was never reconstructed.”

RC: “Tell us more about Flavia’s character and your parents’ dynamic, as two painters living under the same roof.

FC: “Flavia was extremely courageous and endowed with a real practical sense. She was educated, culturally, by her journalist father Ugo. Her mother, Russian sculptor Elena Albrecht Von Brandenburg, abandoned the family when Flavia was still young. She was brought up by a Russian nanny Duniascia, a woman of great strength and affection, who became, in all practical terms, my grandmother. Flavia had that same determined Russian character.

My father was a sunny, joyous person, who thought of nothing but painting. Flavia took care of everything else. Flavia painted, raised her family, managed this house. My mother drove him, and us, wherever we needed to go. My father didn’t even have a driver’s license, and for the longest time, he thought ‘right of way’, was part of the custom ‘ladies first’. Her artistic process was different from my father’s, whose method was ‘fare e finire’, or painting to finish, all in one go, but Mother worked on her paintings for a long time, leaving them in stand-by, before taking them up again, and a number of her pictures remain unfinished. Without so many commitments, she would have done more – but in spite of it all, she painted a few hundred paintings, most of which survive. The canvases she didn’t like, she’d immerse in a tub of water, to remove the paint and reuse.”

Between sips of coffee poured from a pot that may well be a ‘character’ in Flavia’s paintings, I asked Alta, to elaborate on her mother-in-law’s character as well. Our readers will know Alta Macadam as author of the ‘Blue Guides’ for Venice, Rome and Florence. She is currently updating the Florence guide, of which she says, “be patient”. “Flavia was very energetic, nothing stood in her way,” says Alta. “She could get through anything, and if you came to her with a problem, she was always there, to help sort it out… she took time to relax and found time to talk. But Giovanni took up lots of time – he did a lot of painting, and had to, for there was not much money to be had. Sometimes, I’d come in to find Flavia in her overalls, trying to avoid being interrupted, but she was always ready to be interrupted. Any time they spent at the sea was her time to paint, sometimes on summer holiday, and sometimes in winter – especially later in life, as treatment for Giovanni’s bronchial problems. I think she used painting as a time to ‘switch off’. Inside her studio, she was meditative, and inside her own world.”

LINDA FALCONE