The return to Italy and the experience of “la Valle”: the perceptual hole.

Back to Italy, he stills has no idea of what to do with his time. Impatient, since childhood, towards every form of planned existence, Pinto, together with Manfredi, begins to fancy abandoning both painting and the city, persuaded of the irreversibly alienating nature of the capitalist economy.

Since he had the firm belief that it is not possible to find a pictorial practice that allows to think about how past experiences can be topical for the comprehension of the true meaning of everyday life, Pinto experiences the need to start from another "economy" of life.

In the early 60s Pinto leaves Rome with a small group of friends (Manfredi Lanza, Madeleine, Sandro Baldini and his wife Eva, together with two little kids, his brother Enrico) sharing his same need, and went living in some abandoned and lost farmhouse among the hills between Arezzo and Anghiari. Along the way, the group splits: Bruno, Sandro and Eva occupy the abandoned farm called “La Valle", Manfredi go to live alone in an old and unused flour mill, and Enrico in a remote farmstead (see Bruno Pinto “Per uscire dalla valle. Critica di me stesso”, edited by Omar Calabrese, La casa Usher, Florence 1992).

In “la Valle” emerge such violent impulses, feelings, imaginations and thoughts that his mental and psychological patterns fail to consciously hold; all the attempts to accept and fully convey them have the only result to worsen the situation creating more confusion, further than serious and dangerous psychological tensions. On this matter, Pinto writes: “It was like being in a vessel on the high seas, having lost orientation.

Yet, in the midst of confusion, deep down, I felt that something real and positive was happening, even though I could not understand it; for this reason, I tried to avoid easy solutions that I felt dictated by fear and terror instead of real need”.

In that situation Pinto makes new encounters: he discovers authors and readings that help his self-understanding, such as Pasternak, Simone Weil,  Kierkegaard, i Padri della Chiesa, Eliot, Maritain, Marcuse, depth psychology, Zen doctrines, esoterism, Hermetism, Steiner, Guéno, San Giovanni della Croce, Malraux, Agostino, Sedelmaier, Merleau - Ponty, Wilhem Reich, Anna Arendt.

The experiment of "La Valle” lasts about three years, during which each day is organized ab ovo, starting from a total economic and cultural shortage; Pinto lives in a radical existential isolation that turn out to be for his mind a merciless and beneficial razor freeing it from any form of psychologism and narcissistic uselessness: existential experiment to the limit, that will become the foundation for the subsequent development of Pinto’s pictorial, philosophical, anthropological and ontological intuitions.

Bruno reads Elémire Zolla’s books, and meets the author personally in different occasions during his short visits to Rome. He begins a relationship with Laura Lanza, Manfredi’s sister, and feels the need to find a daily work practice that would allow him to observe and consciously accept the "sense of violently dangerous, abysmal internal and external things” experienced at "La Valle".

He perceives that the time of “La Valle" is over.