Leonardo Ricci and Leonardo Savioli. An Epistolary Novel. 1943-1944

Through unpublished letters written by Leonardo Ricci to his friend Leonardo Savioli in 1943 and 1944, the paper aims to trace the early period of the two architects’ careers. The documents allow us to understand how the themes Ricci developed in both architecture and painting from the 1950s onward, and more fully in the 1960s, are present in his thinking as an artist and homme des lettres already from the years just prior to the projects for the reconstruction of the center of Florence. Moreover, the contri- bution highlights how Ricci also began, like Savioli, to design an “Ideal City” as early as 1943. His subsequent plans for new city pieces and his quest for the Integrated City are indebted to the feelings, aspirations and nightmares he experienced during the years of World War II.