The fortuitous discovery of a piece of paper, folded and sewn between the pages of an ancient register preserved in the “Niccolò V” diocesan library and archive of Sarzana, has allowed, in addition to other sources, the local history scholar Elio Gentili to reconstruct the troubled life of painter from Sarzana Camillo Pucci, one of the protagonists of Purism in Italy, an artistic movement of romantic origin that arose in the first half of the nineteenth century. The scant biographical information on Pucci refers above all to his painting “The Martyrdom of Pope Eutychian”, present in the ancient cathedral of Sarzana. With the book “Dear Sarzanese painter”: Camillo Pucci (1802-1869), life and works of an almost forgotten artist”, released in recent days by the Apuan Cultural Center, Gentili intended to investigate a painter who was for a decade at the service of the House of Savoy and whose paintings are scattered in the most important museums of Turin and Genoa, as well as in the churches of many dioceses, including the cathedral of Chiavari. Pucci, active between 1830 and 1865, was also an art critic, Mazzinian conspirator, journalist and poet, appreciated in the Florentine and Genoese academic world. He held the position of councilor in the Municipality of Sarzana several times. In 1865 he was among the founders of the “Cassa di Risparmio di Sarzana”, then of the agricultural consortium and of an evening school for the literacy of the less well-off classes. He endured with Christian resignation the deaths and tragedies that struck his family. The volume also contains brief biographical notes in the appendix on the Sarzanese painter Luigi Belletti (1809-1898), author of the painting “Pope Nicholas V crowning the Emperor Frederick III”, also located in Santa Maria Assunta.
