La Spezia mourns the passing of Francesco Vaccarone, painter and sculptor: he would have turned 84 on October 4th. Struck by an illness a few months ago, his condition worsened yesterday afternoon and in the evening the situation worsened. He leaves a great void in all those who knew him even outside the province of La Spezia: friends, acquaintances and collectors scattered throughout Italy and Europe who received news of his passing during the night.
The city leaves behind a fundamental artist, active from a very young age and a protagonist not only as a painter and sculptor but also as a promoter and animator of hundreds of initiatives linked to the world of art and culture, navigating the decades with a spirit of curiosity and that desire to modernity that put him in direct and profitable interconnection with the new generations to whom he gave knowledge, doubts, solutions, teachings. As a student he graduated in philosophy at the University of Pisa and then in the 70s he took his activity as a painter and sculptor to Genoa, Milan and Rome. When he was very young he was a teacher before art took him over in an all-encompassing way, becoming a profession. He received awards for graphics and woodcuts, was invited to the National Art Quadrennial of Rome in 1986 and to the Venice Art Biennale in 2011. He had also known Sweden where he had a studio for years but had never really left his La Spezia, the sea of the Gulf, Monterosso and the Cinque Terre, painted on many occasions. A city that he loved with passion and of which he saw as a child the rubble of the war and the slow and precarious reconstruction of a place gutted by bombs and crushed by poverty, the hopes of the economic boom in which “we could do everything”, the political commitment in the ranks of the Communist Party, the years of lead and the political complexity that they brought with them; in the meantime dozens and dozens of exhibitions, meetings, experiences up to the closest days, those of globalization where he got to know Cuba and the United States and a world that in the meantime had totally changed the paradigms, finally decimated by Covid and shocked by the latest wars . Old pains that return, on which Vaccarone recently, particularly with the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, felt the urgency to stop and reflect. A profoundly different context compared to when he began the art of painting at the end of the 1950s following the teachings of Caselli and Gino Bellani, both of whom Vaccarone himself also recalled in recent episodes.
A special bond with his city for which he never failed to use affectionate, constructive, at times indulgent words, preferring to exalt its merits and use that witty and ironic language to support a speech, fill an anecdote, make a criticism. Facing negativity with the detachment of the wise and the boundless and all-encompassing love for life. And that personal and collective memory that has never abandoned him. His is an important witness not only for contemporary art but also for the ability to live and tell about a place, a soul, an identity, a habit as his great friend Gino Patroni loved to define it: he, who knowing all the characters and social classes, he perfectly embraced that bittersweet nature and knew how to valorise it like few others. He leaves behind his wife Gabriella, his children Alessandra and Leonardo, his grandchildren and many friends who will always remember him as the Maestro. Heartfelt condolences from the editorial team to all of them City of La Spezia. The funeral will take place on Saturday morning at 11 in the Abbey Church of Santa Maria Assunta.
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