"CERAMICS AND CLOUDS. What ancient Greek ceramics tell us about ourselves" exhibition in Vicenza

Lorenza Natarella

Lorenza is 32 and lives in Milan.
Since co-founding Studio Armadillo in 2011, she has been working as an author, illustrator and graphic designer.
She collaborates with various publishing, corporate and advertising companies, working on stories, images, design, editing, project selection and teaching. She has written and illustrated short stories on current affairs, contemporary news and literature for the cultural supplements of La Stampa Origami and Tuttolibri, 7Corriere, Vanity Fair and Linus. Her work as an author focuses on stories that are true but told as if they were not: she wrote about her childhood in Abruzzo and the importance of self-narration in the comic La Cìtila (Topipittori, Gli anni in tasca, 2013) and the controversial life of Maria Callas in the graphic novel Sempre Libera (BAO Publishing, 2017). In 2023, she edited the comic edition of Il Visconte Dimezzato for Mondadori.

Helen or women

An icon of incomparable beauty? A victim of the power of eros? A brave woman who listens to her heart, or a symbol of infidelity? Helen of Troy and her story are the starting point for a journey into femininity and feminine issues, which are very much at the centre of contemporary debate.

Elisa Macellari

Elisa is an Italian-Thai illustrator, born and raised in Perugia and based in Milan. After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia, she moved to Turin, where she worked as a cultural mediator at the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation. Since 2012, she has been a freelance illustrator for Italian and international publishing houses and magazines. Her clients include The New York Times, Cartoon Network, Donna Moderna, Mondadori, Feltrinelli, Einaudi, Giunti, Piemme, Zanichelli, Nobrow Press, Bandcamp and Langosteria. Her work has been exhibited in Italy and abroad. She has published Papaya salad (BAO Publishing), Kusama. Ossessioni, passione, arte (Centauria) and Loops (BAO Publishing) with Luca Pozzi and Carlo Rovelli.

Dionysus or diversity

Dionysus is the human god par excellence and the foreign god, even in his homeland, a god who is often rejected precisely because of his diversity, his inability to conform, to adapt to rules. Dionysus is irrational, the foreigner, the outsider. A very human god characterised by contradictions and contrasts, which is why he's also an invitation to be tolerant and seek happiness.

Fabio Pia Mancini

Fabio was born just outside Rome in 1990. He trained to work in animation and  was a prop designer for Musicartoon from 2012 to 2014. He then decided to change direction and focus on illustration full time. He has worked with numerous publishers since then, including Mondadori (Black Beauty, Mrs Frisbee and the Rats of NIHM), DeAgostini (Alice in Wonderland, The Jungle Book, Greek Myths), Giunti, Panini, Titan Press, Clementoni and Ravensburger, among others. He has contributed as a comic artist to the anthologies published by independent comic label Attaccapanni Press, Grimorio II (2018) and Melagrana (2017). Since 2021, he has been illustrating the Che Mito! series published by Gallucci, working on thirteen volumes with them. In 2023, he published his first full-length comic, Unboxing Pandora, with Bao Publishing.

Ajax or conflicts

Ajax Telamonius, who, after saving the lifeless body of Achilles together with Odysseus, went mad and ended up killing himself, transports us straight into Homer's stories and Sophocles' tragedies. These stories seem very distant, but they are actually very relevant today, because war, violence and brute force have been a recurring theme in human history, unfortunately right up to the present day. Telling the story of war and its consequences is a reason to talk about peace.

Gio Quasirosso

Giovanni Esposito, known as Quasirosso, is a Neapolitan illustrator and comic artist born in 1992. He started out as a self-taught artist. After studying Graphic Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, he began his career with the publication of his work in several underground magazines in the Campania region. In 2017, he created Quasirosso, a Facebook page featuring comic strips and illustrations, which was met with considerable success, and he went on to establish himself on Instagram. He has published Quasirosso (Shockdom, 2018), Golconda Jazz Club (Round Robin, 2019) and the graphic novels Seitu (2021), Indaco (2022) and Ai Suoi Tratti (2023) for Feltrinelli Comics. He currently works as an illustrator and content creator, collaborating with brands such as Prada, Gucci, Apple, Prime Video, Lucky Red and Pixar, and is in the process of writing his next book.

Eros or desire

An icon that has survived to the present day, Eros represents the idea that the world and human actions have always been governed by love and feelings. Eros is a symbol of physical desire and relationships, but also of the desire for beauty and meaning: the entirely human impulse to seek beautiful things, because desire, in its truest form, is what drives us to act in order to give meaning to who we are. Eros is desire, and desire is, ultimately, the force which we oppose to death.