"Graffito" was a popular form of decoration during the 16th century in Florence. It's obtained by spreading a layer of black stucco or "intonaco" followed by a layer of white stucco. With the use of simple tools the designs were added by etching away the white stucco. In Italiano "graffiare" means to scratch.
"You know what the fellow said: In Italy for thirty years, under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love - they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." ~ Lime, as portrayed by Orson Wells in The Third Man
Alfred Eisenstaedt - Photojournalist of the Century.
Young monks, Florence
Because “you cannot put a book in the witness-chair and ask it what it really means.”
