Piero Guccione

The third son of a middle-class family, his father was a tailor, his mother a housewife. He attended the Comiso art school for a year, then moved to the Catania art institute, where he graduated in 1954. In October 1954, following his father's premature death during the summer, he decided to move to Rome where he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts which he attended for only one month. He lives in a boarding house in San Francesco a Ripa, supporting himself on the subsidy of 500 Lire that he receives from a parastatal school of advertising poster design, intended for those coming from outside the city. In the first two years in Rome he hardly ever painted. He works as a graphic designer in a Roman studio, where he has the opportunity to experiment with new forms of expression such as advertising posters, newspaper caricatures, furniture designs.