Livorno, Italy, summer 1984. In the birthplace of Amedeo Modigliani, famous for the merciless irony of its inhabitants, the innocent joke of three young students turns into the hoax of the century, destined to provoke an earthquake in the entire art world. In a single night, the teenagers carve a “Modigliani style” head with an electric drill. The next day, the find of the sculpture is incredibly recognized by critics and art historians as a fantastic discovery that “sheds a new light on the work of the Master”. The news reverberates everywhere, attracting visitors, journalists and tv crews from around the world…

Modigliani’s Genuine Fake Heads

An underground but mighty river links the cities of Carrara in Tuscany and Barre in Vermont. It is a river through which flow art, history and memory. But above all it is a river that carries with it the tragic epic of an entire community of emigrants from all over Europe engaged in the everlasting and titanic struggle against stone. A river that rises from the quarries of the Apuan Alps, where Michelangelo used to go to obtain the blocks of marble for his masterpieces. And that finds its outlet in the American state of Vermont, amidst dramatic social battles and deaths by freezing, amidst the sorrow of emigration and the splendor of the art of sculpture, amidst anarchic utopia, hope and tragedy.