Virginio Ferrari is an Italian sculptor, born in Verona and based in Chicago from the middle of the 1960s. He has had more than 50 solo exhibitions and participated in more than 150 group shows. In 1992 the publisher Raphael Fodde commissioned a series of illustration for Eugenio Montale, Motets. Virginio Ferrari's modesty has freed him from some of the European tradition and opened him to the simplicity of American art. In this series of etchings the artist interprets the difficult language of the poet with great sensitivity and in his "tempietti"recall the anonimi of Mantegna small temple of Flagellation, attuned to the spiritual reality of Montale's poetry and language. Ferrari having worked in his father stonecutting shop came to understand the power of stone and applying this principle to the composition in an etching plate that he considered like another material for a sculpture project. Like sculpture, poetry is made of rhythmic verses, sounds, words, all playing on the scale of our inner sentiments, clusters of meaning that suddenly become touchable sculpture is thus open to solitary meditations.