Contemporary artists have been drawn to Rome by the thread of an ancient tradition that began at the end of the cinquecento with Caravaggio, a Lombard, and continues into our own times with Cy Twombly, a Virginian, and Jannis Kounellis, a Greek from Piraeus, and many others, each working in his own stylistic vein. What has attracted them if not the city's tolerance of decay, and the glimpse of the future, of the ultimate order of things, that that decay affords?

Pizzi Cannella, however, is a native, and he therefore expresses himself directly, without recourse to simulacra of that dense, shadowy