Paesaggi di carta. I calanchi romagnoli nei disegni di Romolo Liverani

Romolo Liverani (1809-1872) was an artist from Faenza, who dealt with landscape painting in Romagna Region around the middle of the 19th century. His works, collected in notebooks now mainly conserved in the Art Gallery of Faenza, the Faenza Municipal Library and the Forlì Municipal Library, Piancastelli Collection, were taken en plein air in the framework of field trips in rural areas. The paper will focus on drawings representing the bandlands (in Italian, ‘calanchi’) of the Argille Azzurre Formation, a Plio-Pleistocene clay outcrop located in the lower Apennine of Faenza (Province of Ravenna, Northern Italy): a rugged landscape characterized by landslides and a low human density, close to the philosophical and aestethic concepts of Romanticism and Sublime, in which Liverani was used to recognize himself. In particular, Liverani’s drawings of the badlands of Mt. Querzola (located at the border between the Municipalities of Castelbolognese and Riolo Terme), so far unpublished, will be discussed: the author gave emphasis to this landscape in his works, as he was impressed by the absence of vegetation and the rough geomorphologies of the area.