Terracotta bust depicting Cesare Pavese, work signed by the sculptor Franco Daverio. Cesare Pavese (Santo Stefano Belbo, 9 September 1908 – Turin, 27 August 1950) was an Italian writer, poet, translator and literary critic, among the most influential and representative of his era. Thanks to his unique style and his ability to address profound and universal themes, Pavese is considered a true milestone of 20th century Italian literature. Daverio (Erba 1917 – 1999) attended the Cantù School of Applied Arts where he met Fausto Melotti, his teacher in the Plastic Art course. A teacher with a modern spirit, whose teaching was aimed at enhancing the intimate and spontaneous expressive needs of children. In 1966, on the occasion of an exhibition dedicated to Daverio, Fausto Melotti introduced him as follows: "Ever since he was still a boy and my pupil, he managed to engrave a lyrical tension in his drawings that no one could have given or taught him; Daverio's temperament responded with magnificent lyrical surges and his drawings, which the war unfortunately destroyed, would bear witness to how authentic his way of interpreting reality is in the works he exhibits which, despite starting from his melancholy dreamy world , finds the hard projections of true sculpture.” “a trace of that creative teaching has remained, clearly recognisable, in the way of operating and of returning to a free fantastic universe that characterizes the multifaceted work of Franco Daverio” At his early debut in the world of art, he illustrated one of the prestigious covers of the Galleria's magazine Il Milione, where he exhibited, in a collective exhibition of the Cantù School of Art, some drawings also admired by Le Corbusier, who was visiting in that period in Italy and who said "I recognized the most beautiful and interesting things of my trip in the drawings of this young man". These innate prerogatives are not followed by an equally frequent exhibition commitment, as Bruno Talpo well understands: "... in comparison he preferred the alchemical work, the introspective jewel, almost as if exhibiting one's art objects in natural light would risk destroying them or disperse them, thereby losing the key to one's own internal labyrinth.” His works tell of the primitives, Egyptians and Sumerians, the totems and masks of African art, the medieval cycles and, last but not least, Picasso and Modigliani. Thus, "sculptures like ghosts that have memories of an ancient culture, rooted in the certain materiality of things" are born from his hands. Now the time has come for Daverio to receive great recognition for his incessant activity and without concessions to trends and compromises. And this could only be linked to the Catalan city where Picasso, Mirò and Dalì worked. The Macba, the astonishingly modern Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, ​​designed by the architect R. Meyer, which collects and exhibits works by Klee, Rauschenberg, Tapies, Fontana, Long, Calder, has acquired 4 graphic works by Daverio.