"My Florentine family had a long tradition of artistic activities, and in the late fifties I taught myself to carve stones found in the local riverbeds. Then I finished medical school, became a surgeon, got married, came to the United States and for forty years had little time to devote to artistic activity. When I retired in 1998, I started stone carving again. A lifetime of close contact with the real problems of real people had widened my perspective, and I could no longer be satisfied with sculpting pretty shapes to please the eye. I wanted to use durable stone to tell tales about myths, religions, fables, history and even recent events, always with a satirical and skeptical twist. I wanted to imitate the anonymous medieval sculptors who carved sacred histories on the walls of ancient cathedrals, but instead of their unyielding faith in a hypothetical world of the spirit I would bring the critical and questioning mind of a modern man rooted in a world of empirical reality. I do believe that all art is ultimately a form of communication between human minds, although more on an emotional rather than a strictly rational level."