Murale dei Picasass

A wall-sized painting in Piazza Matteotti gathers Baveno's granite economy into one image. The Murale dei Picasass, painted in 1979 by the Omegna-born artist Gilberto Carpo with students of the Circolo Bavenese art circle, is about seventy square metres of tribute to the picasass, the stonecutters whose quarries made Baveno's pink granite famous.

Why it matters

The mural is both artwork and document. The official municipal account records that its subject was chosen by a popular assembly, that Carpo collected the testimony of working stonecutters before painting, and that the composition draws on a photograph of a column being worked for the Cathedral of Milan — the kind of prestigious commission Baveno granite regularly won. Painted at the end of the 1970s, when the great era of quarrying was already receding, it fixed the memory of the trade in the very square where the townspeople walked daily. The municipal description also places the work within the Italian movement of the Nuova figurazione italiana, the return-to-figuration current of those years.

What to notice

The lower registers show stonecutters at work and women carrying the gaula, a basket used to transport explosive powder to the quarries. In the upper portion, geometric, serial lines represent industrial production, in the municipal portal's interpretation. The column crossing the painting in perspective derives from the Milan Duomo photograph that inspired Carpo.

Context and history

The mural belongs to Baveno's late twentieth-century reckoning with its granite identity. The picasass — the dialect word for the quarrymen and carvers of the Baveno hills — reached their golden age between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, working for dynasties the official history names as Adami, Bernasconi, Cirla, Della Casa, Galli, Polli and Tamini. From the mid-1800s Baveno pink granite went into buildings across Europe, the Americas and East Asia, with Nicola Della Casa's firm pioneering mechanised processing and international export from 1874 onward.

Against that background, the 1979 mural project reads as an act of civic memory rather than decoration: a community commission, decided in open assembly, painted with the art circle's own students under a professional lead, in a piazza at the centre of town. The Circolo Bavenese and the artist's use of first-hand testimony tie the image to the working generation it honours.