We are now in the very heart of the house-museum — the atelier where Alice began painting in the 1970s, and where her masterpieces are gathered today. Among them, clearly visible as you enter, are the Casoratian eggs, one of the favorite motifs used by her master to teach his students the foundations of his personal compositional philosophy — a balance of geometry and grace.
On the wall opposite, we find a Nude much like the one Alice exhibited at the 24th Venice Biennale — the first held after the war. It was the Biennale that introduced Picasso to the world, but also a Biennale of women reclaiming their place in art history: Leonor Fini, Carol Rama, Gina Roma — Serse’s aunt. For Alice, it was an artistic baptism — her true beginning.
At the center of the wall, the Artichokes represent one of the ripest fruits of her neo-Cubist experimentation. It is a still life that does not spring from reality, but from literary imagination — from the artichokes of Giorgio De Chirico. Alice’s art becomes allusive, intellectual, and deeply cultured — an art of references and echoes. She had met De Chirico in Venice toward the end of the 1940s, by which time she had already become a professor of art history. Yet her interpretation of the master’s model was profoundly her own: behind the shards and fragments composing the image, one can almost glimpse the difficult Triestine years under the Allied Military Government, which ended only with the city’s return to Italy in 1954.
Alice never remained indifferent to the great tides of History. In the 1970s she would once again respond to them with her Venice Submerged cycle — born from yet another dramatic experience: the great flood of 1966, the acqua granda. By then, Alice had settled in Venice, where with the Large Self-Portrait in Blue she inaugurated a period of technical and narrative experimentation. The undisputed masterpiece of this phase is Seaweed on the Bottom, later chosen as the cover of her major 2003 monograph. With Seaweed on the Bottom, Alice began to dissolve the strict Cubist structures into color — slipping, almost unknowingly, into the depths of her own interior world. Here, Alice brushed against abstraction.
But that fascination was short-lived. Her return to Trieste in 1971 marked a new and definitive embrace of figuration — though filtered through the evanescent forms of a surreal reality that blended the sacred and the profane, what critic Vittorio Sgarbi called “provisional realism.” The call of the beyond — of the unseen — certainly echoed from the sorrows of those years: the premature death of a nephew, and, most painfully, of her beloved husband. A “spiritual orchestra” began to populate her canvases of the 1990s — musicians teaching the forests to resound with the names of the departed.
The early 2000s were years of reflection — of revisiting and reinterpreting the themes of a lifetime. Music, as critic Marina Poggi d’Angelo observed, was for Alice a “karstic motif” — one that surfaced and disappeared, the ideal thread through which she expressed her late Symbolist sensibility.
Yet nostalgia still had one final creative surge: the Cycladic Idols — the ancient deities of her ancestral lands — which she painted until her last days, placing them, serene and drowsy, within a landscape that had by then become more spiritual than real: a landscape of the soul.
