These watercolors are inspired by decorative limestone “Pietra Paesina” – Florentine marble.
In this series I painted more than 40 watercolors, in 2019-2020, inspired by the various textures and the appearance of a landscapes of these completely unique rocks.
“Pietra Paesina” – landscape stone or Florentine marble is also known as marble ruiniforme, the stone is a variety of limestone found in the Northern Apennines in Italy.
It is a sedimentary stone mainly made of compressed limestone and clay that was formed in sea beds with infiltrations of iron and manganese hydroxide which create the different colors with light grey from the limestone, reddish-brown from iron oxides and manganese provides black and blue for the clay.
This rock was formed during the Eocene epoch period, about 53 to 39 million years ago. The beautiful patterns are created when the earth’s movement causes fractures in the stone.
Update 2026
During the Urbino In Acquerello 2026 – International Watercolor Festival Urbino in Italy, I took up the theme of Pietra paesina. Inspired by the places I visited in Urbino, in the Umbria and Tuscany regions, I painted a new series of watercolors, in which the landscape is rendered in a fragmented style, similar to that of the Pietra paesina ruiniform limestones.
The imaginary landscapes rendered in watercolors are inspired by architecture in Sighisoara, Rome, Florence, the Alps, Mont-Saint-Michel, Normandy coast, Ronda in Spain, Arctic Ocean or fires in Australia or Greece.
Technic: watercolor on paper, 425g/m, size 24×32 cm, 30×40 cm, 2019-2020, 2025.
