The walls of the room below Vanvitelli’s monumental hall, currently used as a bibliography room, are adorned with four tempera lunettes that have only recently been the subject of interest. A careful study conducted a few years ago finally succeeded in identifying its author and hypothesising a date. These are four landscapes relating to the world of the economy: from work in the countryside, to machine shops (where light poles appear), to maritime and rail transport, to colonies populated by Arabian figures traceable to Italian expansionism in Libya.

These features provide useful hints for assuming a date around 1911-12.

Director of the Angelica Library in those years was Domenico Gnoli, but research in his archive papers has revealed no commission, no budget for the decoration of this room: thus no institutional assignment but rather a ‘spontaneous’ ornamentation.

Let us now identify who is hiding under the initials F.C. that appear in the bottom of a barrel in the centre of the lunette depicting the seascape.

The Italian State, starting in 1891, had made available to ‘deserving young artists’ the possibility of a four-year stay in Rome and in a story by Guido Marangoni that appeared in Franco Grasso’s article dedicated to Francesco Camarda’s work in ‘Nuovi quaderni del Meridione’, he describes the ‘rataia di via della Scrofa’ where Francesco Camarda stayed for four years together with Armando Spadini and Raffaele Uccella, all three winners of the 1910 State Pension Competition. The plausible hypothesis could therefore be that of a demonstration or a challenge by Camarda, a young ‘figure’ painter, only 23 years old, to Spadini, who was already working on landscapes at the time, with the consequent request to work on the newly restored premises. Perhaps it is precisely the closeness and influence that the two young men exerted on each other during those years of Roman cohabitation that lies behind this landscape exercise that can still be admired today in the bibliography room of the Angelica Library.