Abruzzese by birth but Pesaro of adoption, Nino Caffè (Civitella Alfedena 1908 – Pesaro 1975) is known how The ‘painter’ of the Pretini ‘ For the vast production dedicated to that portion of ecclesiastical humanity looked at with satirical spirit and
humorous. Fifty years after deathPesaro celebrates him with ‘Nino Caffè. Between naturalism and satire, the exhibition with which it comes inaugurated The new recovered wing of the civic museums of Palazzo Mosca.
Despite the intent of the most felt criticism of redeeming Nino Caffè by the role of “caricaturist” painter who was still attributed to him today It is difficult to show it as belonging to the best Italian painting of the twentieth century. We ourselves took care of the artist’s exhibitions years ago, including the one held in the Palazzo del Senato in Rome. With 65 paintings – synthesis of his activity from the 1930s to the ’70s – from 19 private loansthe exhibition project offers itself as an opportunity to investigate and make known the place he has occupied in Italian artistic culture linked to tradition painting but enriched with new witty and unwanted themes.
The exhibition is promoted by Municipality of Pesaro and organized by Pescheria Foundation – Visual Art Center In collaboration with Pesaro Museums; with the contribution of the Marche region; with the support of: Nino Caffe Association, Italian Association of Artist Archives, Spadolini Foundation New Anthology.
That of the Pretini has been the recurring theme of coffee since the mid -1940s, together with the more traditional ones such as dead nature, the portrait and the landscape with which he participates in numerous exhibitions between the Biennials of Venice, quadrennal of Rome and union regional starting from 
1931, also receiving prizes. Painting the clergy became its almost exclusive acronym since 1950when he meets the favor of the Roman gallery, the Obelisk of Irene Brin and Gaspero of the course who decide to launch him on the European and American market and who precisely with their own staff open their office in New York. On this occasion, the Metropolitan Museum also acquires its work. Through an unprecedented reading of ecclesiastical types of various levels that become real caricatures of the clergy and the Church, Caffè invents a tòpos And it gives free rein to an increasingly rich and funny imagination: clerics, deacons, priests, bishops, cardinals in unconventional attitudes, immersed in a world of their own made of dreams, aspirations, habits, sollazzi, but also fears and guilt. The first intuition on the theme comes to coffee from the ranks of Prelates who sees pass under his home in Urbino in the stay in that city between 1943 and 1944, a guest before the Superintendent Pasquale Rotondi and then of the family Ben
Edetti. At first the “Pretini” populate the city landscapes and the Urbinate and Pesaro countryside, then become a pre -eminent subject of his paintings. When he moved to Rome – in full Jubilee of 1950 – there will be numerous requests for his works on the topic by the International collecting. However, his honest formation of a painter, continued in contact with certainly avant -garde environments such as the Florentine and Roman one, does not make him forget the profession of the figurative painter, the inevitable passage through drawing and the project, meditation on stage compositions in his works 
choral. And while i landscapes show the exercise of painting en Plen Airi portraits – that they were often requested and which equally often granted friends and family – and the death lifes They focus on a psychological research of faces and sets of objects, in harmony with a close vision of the subjects, the ‘Pretini’ become a real genre apart from a universe full of iconographies.
So the poet Aldo Palazzeschi He wrote about coffee in 1950: (…) Taking the young seminarians of common life to the subject, in the refectory sitting in canteen, in an hour of recreation in the courtyard of the seminary or on the beach of the sea, candidly asleep dreamy and purple, the artist has been able to draw from black, the symbol of austere and painful things, pure and simple joy. A happily resolved pictorial problem that constitutes its conquest and for us the novelty: poetry. Nino Caffè is caught, but in the heat ofHis art instinct prevails; Treasure of Tuscan classicism adds a native sensuality in the color so, if we had to give this Marches an ideal homeland, it is towards the winged lion that we should address. He will not escape the observer, profane or competent, movement and meaning
Architectural refinement of his paintings “.
Born in Civitella Alfedena in 1908, Nino Caffè He first studied in L’Aquila from 1923 in Ancona, where the family moves. Ludovico Spagnolini gives him the first painting lessons. In 1930 the family moved to Pesaro, where Nino immediately fits into the lively cultural life of the city and where he knows and attended many of the local artists: Bruno Baratti, Werter Bettini, Ciro Cancelli, Alessandro Gallucci, Aldo Pagliacci, Achille Wildi. In 1931 he began to exhibit and in 1938 he participated for the first time at the Venice Biennale. During the war he is a guest of the Benedetti family in Urbino: from their home in front of the Domen he portrays the first Pretini. In 1942 the Milanese gallery of Ettore Gianferrari dedicated a first exhibition to him. In 1948 he has the first exhibition in Pesaro in the Rossini’s birthplace. After the exhibitions of Milan and Pesaro, a successful period begins for coffee, also linked to the development of the theme of the so -called ‘Pretini’ and the satirical representations of characters from the Roman Curia and in general of the Church universe. In fact, ranks of clerics and prelates were those who saw Caffè who saw under the home of Urbino where he lives in the war years. With this artistic typology, Caffè overlooks the 1950 Jubilee, takes a study in Rome and acquires the attention of the pilgrims who also seek some pictorial peculiarities in Rome. Here he deals with him the Gallery The Obelisk of Gaspero del Corso and Irene Brin. The 1950s are for cafes full of commissions, especially American, so much so that many of his best paintings are still found at the US private collections. His fame as a ‘painter of Pretini’ becomes international. In 1963 he closed his Roman study and decided to return to Pesaro, while continuing to collaborate with the obelisk. It is also invited to exhibit in other galleries, in Milan, Verona, Palermo, Genoa, La Spezia. He died in Pesaro in 1975 at just 66 years old.
Carlo Franza