Monumento allo scalpellino

On the lakefront promenade of Baveno, a figure bends over a block of his own town's stone. The Monumento allo scalpellino, carved from Baveno pink granite by the local sculptor Raffaele Polli, shows a young picasass — as Baveno's quarrymen are called in dialect — at work on a rough block, refuting the old slight that the stonecutters were sculptors without art.

Why it matters

Baveno lived for centuries from its pink granite, the best known of the Graniti dei Laghi, exported across Italy and, from the mid-nineteenth century, throughout Europe, the Americas and East Asia. The picasass were the men who extracted and worked that stone, and their golden age ran from the late nineteenth into the early twentieth century. A monument that portrays one of them, in their own material, on the town's principal promenade, is therefore not decorative public art but a civic self-portrait. The official municipal inventory records both the author, the sculptor Raffaele Polli described as native to the place, and the setting on the lungolago where passers-by meet it at eye level.

What to notice

Look at the two elements in counterpoint: the young quarryman, modelled with working posture rather than heroic stance, and the plain block he attacks. The subject of the sculpture is the transformation itself — the municipal text stresses that from an apparently ordinary block the worker, through effort and passion, draws out a work of art. The stone of the sculpture is the stone of the story: Baveno pink granite from the quarries behind the town, so the monument demonstrates the very material culture it commemorates.

The theme continues in the Picasass Mural in Piazza Matteotti, painted in 1979 by Gilberto Carpo with pupils of the Circolo Bavenese, and in the nearby War Memorial, which depicts a stonecutter as the father figure in its bronze farewell group.

Context and history

The monument belongs to the wave of local recognition of the granite heritage. The official portal's granite history names the great quarrying dynasties of the Bavenese picasass — Adami, Bernasconi, Cirla, Della Casa, Galli, Polli, Tamini — and recounts how Nicola Della Casa (1843–1894) industrialised the trade from 1874, earning the title of premiata ditta in 1879, a gran diploma d'onore for being the first in Italy to apply mechanical processing to granite, and pioneering steam-powered polishing and export offices across Europe and the Americas. Polli, the sculptor of the lakeside monument, bears a name from that same quarrying world, and the municipal page introduces him as a sculptor originating from the town. The sculpture thus closes a circle between the families who ran the quarries and the men whose hands did the work.

Street names in the town — via Cave, via degli Scalpellini, via del Granito Rosa — record the same history in nomenclature, and the Sentiero del granito connects the town with the extraction landscape on Monte Camoscio.