Giovanni Colacicchi (Anagni, Frosinone, 1900-Florence, 1992), painter, completed his early studies in the seminary, attended high school in Rome and then moved permanently to Florence in 1918. As early as his high school years, he devoted himself to poetry, flanked by a passion for painting. Beginning in the 1920s, he frequented the “Giubbe Rosse” café, where he met, among others, Aldo Palazzeschi, Libero Andreotti and his teacher Francesco Franchetti; he also met Onofrio Martinelli, with whom a fraternal bond and a very intense artistic exchange were born; later, Mario Castelnuovo Tedesco, for whom he was to curate the sets for the opera Bacchus’ Dithyramb, staged at La Scala in 1931. After the war, he took part in the city’s literary life and in 1924 was among the founders of the “Rivista di Firenze”; two years later, with Alberto Carocci, Raffaello Franchi, Leo Ferrero, Bruno Bramanti and Bonaventura Tecchi, he started “Solaria.”
Flavia Arlotta (Sorrento, Naples, 1913-Florence, 2010), artist and painter, spent her childhood in Sorrento and attended gymnasium in Naples for one year, then went on to art school and thus began painting with master Ezechiele Guardascione. In 1930, at the age of seventeen, she followed her father to Florence and the following year met Giovanni Colacicchi, who gave her private painting lessons. She graduated from high school in 1935 and began associating assiduously with Colacicchi, whom she married in 1952 and by whom she would have two sons, Piero and Francesco.
The Giovanni Colacicchi and Flavia Arlotta Fund, consisting of printed materials, was donated to the Foundation in 2017 by their son Francesco. The fund is divided into the following sections: Periodicals e Magazines, consisting of a rich collection of twentieth-century journals such as “Il Ponte,” “Letteratura,” “Argomenti” and “Nuovi Argomenti,” “La Riforma Letteraria,” “La Critica,” “Botteghe Oscure,” “La Ronda,” and “La Critica d’Arte,” just to mention a few of the most important and comprehensive ones; Library, consisting of over sixty volumes, collects catalogs of group and solo exhibitions by Giovanni Colacicchi, catalogs of exhibitions by Flavia Arlotta, and catalogs of exhibitions by various artists and painters.
