Grazia's page at Florence Statuary

Hello! This is Grazia Maccarone's page at Florence Statuary. It may tell you more than you really wanted to know about me, but if you clicked your way up to here, well, I guess that's what you were looking for. By the way, the picture you see of me here was taken a few years ago on the night train going from Moscow to St. Petersburg, you may guess why I was going there: a place called "Hermitage".......

So, about me.... Let's see. I was born in Florence some years ago (you don't ask exactly when to a lady). My name ("Maccarone") doesn't sound Florentine, and indeed it is not. It is because my father is from Sicily but, besides that, I am as Florentine as anyone who was born in Florence and has lived most of his or her life there.

I have a degree in Education that I took at the University of Florence, but I never was that interested in teaching. I've always loved art, and figurative art in particular. Back in 1976 I moved to the US with my husband. I lived in New York and San Francisco, beautiful places. For some years I was going back and forth from Italy to the US and I started dealing with original prints: Art Nouveau and Art Deco prints from the great artists of those times, Toulouse-Lautrec, Parrish, Icart, Robbe....... The image you see here is from my personal collection of Meschini, an Italian Art Deco artist not so well known as he would deserve. When I moved back to Italy I worked in a shop in Florence that dealt with these prints and also with Japanese Ukiyo-e prints, European prints, originals from the Renaissance. Great things to have in your hands and the feeling of touching something made by Hokusai or Albrecht Durer is incredible.

My time with prints was a nice one, but later on I found myself working more and more with statuary. It may be a family tradition that led me to that. Some sixty years ago my father came to Florence all the way from Sicily just because he wanted to become a sculptor. He did. Anyway, for 17 years I've been working at the "Galleria Frilli" in Florence. You see me there with a bronze replica of the classic "Chimera of Arezzo", the original is at the Archaeological Museum in Florence. The Galleria Frilli is a historical gallery, more than a century old, steeped in that ancient Italian tradition of making bronze and marble replicas of ancient Renaissance and Classical statuary: Michelangelo, Donatello, Cellini and so many others. If you like marble and bronze replicas you can contact me, I still work with the gallery, even though I don't go there every morning as I used to until 2001.

If you arrived to this page, you probably know that in 1999 I set up my own company (Florence Statuary). Not that I didn't like my job at Frilli but, frankly, so many years of the same work were enough. I guess everyone wants to change after a while. So, I decided to move to deal with pieces that I personally like, without limiting myself to replicas.

But setting up "Florence Statuary" has not been the only change in my life, recently. I also went back to my original interest in paintings. This time, too, I got involved with unique pieces rather than replicas as when I worked with prints. I am now working with "Galleria Parronchi" in Firenze about original 19th century impressionist paintings. That's an unbelievably fascinating subject, if you would like to know more, contact me at Florence statuary.

What else? I live in the town of Fiesole, which is a nice place on the hills near Florence. I have a husband, two children (well, they are kind of grown up by now) two dogs and a cat. If you want to contact me you can do that at Florence Statuary. Thanks for visiting my page, come back when you have a moment.