Volpedo

Volpedo sits in the Colli Tortonesi, fifty-five kilometers north of Genova, on the lower slopes between the Curone and the Grue. The two rivers frame the hill country that supplies the DOC wines, and the village itself is small enough that its medieval core, its parish church at the edge of town, and the painter's studio at the opposite edge all sit within walking distance of one another. Giuseppe Pellizza was born in Volpedo on 28 July 1868, studied with Fattori at the Accademia in Florence, and returned in 1892, when he began signing his work da Volpedo.

He married Teresa Bidone, who died in childbirth in 1907, the same year Pellizza died by his own hand in the studio he had built in 1888. That studio stands still, kept as he left it. The centro storico's own piazza served as the setting for his 1901 canvas, painted a few years before his death. The town's identity rests on that short span between 1868 and 1907: a painter who left, trained elsewhere, and came back to set his most famous work in the square outside his door, on hills he kept painting until the end.