The artist

The artist is an Italian sculpturer. He is Ciro Califano, a 61 year old man. He is known as a most incredible artist and has a great ability to take an ordinay cork and make it a beautiful work of art. Ciro use to work for the post office. During his life, he traveled between Milan, Naples and Nocera a great deal. Ciro had always had an ambition for the arts. He grew up in the Italian countryside dreaming of becoming an artist. He had high hopes of people actually knowing him for his abilities.

A dream come true

It was 10 years ago that Ciro’s sons started up a local restaurant. It was called the ‘Cantina del Vescovo’, or Bishops Cellar. This is when Ciro decided he wanted to exhibit his talents of sculpting. He quickly accumulated a lot of corks from his son’s restaurant and they provided the perfect medium for him to use. Ciro started making small copies of the buildings of the Roman ancient days.

The mini collisium

Ciro spent possibly more than a year on each of his sculptures. He did every little detail of the building he was replicating. There were individual chambers, staircases that spiraled to different levels, hallways, platforms. whatever the building he was replicating had, he built it into his sculpture using corks. To do the work he used many different tools. He had to use extremely sharp knives, rulers for accuracy, and of cource the glue to hold the corks in place. For the mini collisium, Ciro worked for more than a year. He moved his studio into his son’s restaurant which brought in a different clientel of people who enjoyed the arts. The collisium took 10,000 corks to complete. When Ciro descides to copy a building, the first thing he does is study the history of the building. He then descides on what size to make it. After doing that,  he begins his work.