Biography

In 1948, out of instinctive impatience with any overly institutionalized form of life, he abandoned his regular school studies and began copying scenes from comic books and humorous cartoons and performing caricatures, trying to imitate Sciltian. His father decides to cultivate his artistic streak.

Master Francesco Cretara, former director of the Scuola Rinascita in Rome, where advertising techniques were taught, took him into his studio; here Pinto learned to draw by copying the classics, made his first attempts at oil painting, and practiced etching and advertising graphics. Despite his natural talent, Bruno failed to make appreciable progress and left Cretara’s studio.

Strongly impressed by a book of drawings and Van Gogh’s letters, he begins to draw with pen and charcoal both fantasy and from life. He shows his drawings to Cretara, who is surprised and strongly urges him to continue.
Some of his etchings are exhibited at the 1955 Quadriennale in Rome and acquired by the Calcografia Nazionale. He becomes interested in the painting of Giotto, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Goya, Courbet and Daumier. He begins to take an interest in the history of the movements and protagonists of Modern Art and intuitively becomes aware of the intimate and instinctive reasons that provoked his natural impatience with institutional studies: he understands that it is precisely the practices imposed by rigidly programmed and automatic learning that paralyze the vital creative faculties.

His father took him to Renato Guttuso, who appreciated his talent and urged him to devote himself entirely to art, invited him to attend his studio and, given the family’s condition of economic penury, promised to hire him as a helper as well; but, after a few meetings, Pinto decided to break off his attendance and work in the studio of engraver, sculptor and medallist Celestino Giampaoli.

He met the painter Natili and was admitted to the evening classes of the free school of the nude at the French Academy at Villa Medici.
He began working as an advertising artist at the American Advertising Agency.
At the National Gallery of Modern Art, directed by Palma Bucarelli, he attends the Sunday lectures on Modern Art, where he has the opportunity to see the major retrospectives devoted to Picasso, Mondrian and Pollock: thanks to the latter, he receives the strong, though confused, impression that with Pollock we have reached the extreme consequences of the dramatic, even tragic, experiences of Modern Art.
It was then that Pinto began to react negatively to all those social conditioning that bound him to a way of life from which he increasingly felt he had to detach himself. Together with his friend Angelo Milani, he proposed to leave his family and Italy.

His meeting with Manfredi Lanza, his peer, French-educated and nephew of Lanza del Vasto, arouses a different cultural tension in him, allowing him a clearer perception of the nature of his anxieties; Manfredi urges Bruno to leave and is willing to help him; it is a necessary departure to free himself from the provincial climate of Italian culture.

A group of friends is formed, aspiring painters working in Manfredi’s studio at Villa Strolfen: they get together to work on painting, read French poets, manifestos of the historical avant-gardes, Futurist, Surrealist and Dadaist writings; cultivate an interest in “primitives.”

Pinto remains strongly impressed by that aspect of Modern Art that will remain forever at the center of his interests and research, namely that the work of the most authentic experimenters in Modern Art was animated by the desire to find through art the way to a primordial, original, existential condition, hoping to achieve an ontological wholeness, an immediate identification of art-life-truth, even though they “failed” in their intent.

For Pinto, the contemporary neo-avant-gardes were consumed in vain and conformist aestheticizing experiments, instead of striving to trace back to the strong poetic instances that animated the great personalities of the historical avant-gardes.

So what to do after the Informal, which marked the extreme limit beyond which it is not possible to go in research without a substantial renunciation of certain mental and emotional behaviors? For Pinto, it is necessary to renounce the very idea of avant-garde art and give an “other” form to the desire for knowledge of the Truth of Life.

With his mind animated by questions as confused as they are violent and passionate, he leaves for England.
In 1959 he stays for nine months in London, called by his painter friend Francesco Galante, assistant to an established sculptor friend of the Lanzas, Fiore De Henriquez. At night he works in a bar/restaurant, while during the day he visits and revisits museums and art galleries, and discovers the metropolis.
He lives in different social environments, realizing that inner misery dwells as much in the home of the rich banker as in that of the common dockworker, and is not automatically affected by external environmental conditions: he is humanly alienated from both the man on the street and the rich capitalist. For him, instinctively, the problem arises in anthropological and ontological terms, even before social and political ones.
In London he meets Henry Moore, Augustus Johne, and also sees Manfredi Lanza again; he resumes with him the reflection around the problems of painting and the relations between it and the destiny of human existence.

He stayed for three months in Paris where he met Gino Severini who, ill, encouraged him to work and promised, as soon as he was cured, to help him stay in Paris, introducing him to the artistic environment. Severini’s illness was prolonged and Pinto, unable to find work, returned to Rome. There he sees Manfredi again and meets Lanza del Vasto; both he and Manfredi are guests for a few months at the Ecumenical Community de l’Arche in southern France.

Returning to Italy, he still does not know what to do.
Intolerant, since childhood, of any form of programmed existence, Pinto begins to imagine with Manfredi to abandon painting and the city, convinced of the irreversibly alienating nature of the capitalist economy.
Believing it is not possible to find a pictorial practice that allows one to reflect on the actuality of living in order to have an authentic knowledge of the true meaning of what is experienced in the actuality of daily existence, Pinto feels the need to start from “another” economy of Life.

In the early 1960s he leaves Rome with a small group of friends who share his urgency (Manfredi Lanza, Madeleine, Sandro Baldini with his wife Eva and two small children, his brother Enrico), to go and live in some abandoned and lost farmhouses in the mountains between Arezzo and Anghiari. The group, along the way, splits up: Bruno, Sandro and Eva occupy the abandoned farm of “La Valle,” Manfredi goes to live alone in an old, unused mill and Enrico in a remote farmhouse (see Bruno Pinto, To Get Out of the Valley. Critique of Myself, edited by Omar Calabrese, The House Usher, Florence 1992).

In “The Valley” violent impulses, feelings, imaginations and thoughts emerged in him that his mental and psychological habits could not consciously contain; all attempts to try to take them on and communicate them fully only aggravated and generated more confusion, as well as serious and dangerous psychic tensions; in this regard Pinto writes: “It was like being on a boat on the high seas, having lost orientation. However, in the midst of the bewilderment, deep down, I sensed that something real and positive was happening, even if I could not comprehend it, so I tried to avoid easy solutions that I felt were dictated by fear and terror rather than by real need.”

In that situation, Pinto makes new encounters: he discovers authors and readings that help him in self-understanding such as Pasternak, Simone Weil, Kierkegaard, the Church Fathers, Eliot, Maritain, Marcuse, depth psychoanalysis, Zen doctrines, esotericism, hermeticism, Steiner, Guéno, St. John of the Cross, Malraux, Augustine, Sedelmaier, Merleau – Ponty, Wilhem Reich, Anna Arendt.

The experiment of “The Valley” lasts for about three years, during which every day must be reorganized ab ovo, starting with total economic and cultural penury; Pinto lives in a radical existential isolation that serves as a merciless and beneficial razor for his mind, freeing it from all forms of psychologism and narcissistic uselessness: an existential experiment on the “edge,” which will prove foundational for the subsequent development of Pinto’s pictorial, philosophical, anthropological and ontological insights.

He reads the books of Elémire Zolla, whom he will get to know personally by meeting him several times during short trips to Rome. Begins a relationship with Laura Lanza, Manfredi’s sister, and feels the need to find a daily work practice that allows him to consciously observe and assume the “sense of the violent, dangerous, abysmal inner and outer ‘things’” experienced at “La Valle.” He sensesthat the time of “The Valley” is over.

After several searches, he met Giuseppe Dossetti, who visited “The Valley” and offered him the opportunity to move to the Borgo dell’Abbazia di Monteveglio, near Bologna.

Many months (almost a year) are spent in the search for other solutions, some indicated by Elémire Zolla, who vague about the possibility of participating in the group’s adventure, but, as soon as he learns that the group accepts Dossetti’s offer, he decisively expresses his negative opinion. While sharing Zolla’s reasons (also expressed in part by Father Giovanni Vannucci, translator of the Filocalia, an anthology of ascetic texts by monks of the first centuries of the Christian era, a text that Bruno will always carry with him), Pinto’s urgency is to understand the true meaning of the “unimaginable complexity and violent conflictuality of the realities experienced in La Valle” so in 1964 he moves with the others of the group to Monteveglio (except Manfredi).

He established a frank and intense relationship with Dossetti, even in the considerable differences of thought; many doubts troubled his spirit before he decided to accept his proposal.

He married Laura Lanza and, over the course of seven years, four children were born-Gabriel, John, Raphael and Bianca Maria.

At that time, on the occasion of the Second Vatican Council, Monteveglio is the site of meetings between national and international personalities from various cultural backgrounds, belonging to the political, secular and religious worlds, which offer Pinto the opportunity for significant, decisive comparisons and verifications confirming the singular and intrinsic creative force present in the insights that sustain his research (cf. Bruno Pinto, Per uscire dalla valle. Critique of Myself, edited by Omar Calabrese, The Usher House, Florence 1992).

In Monteveglio, while his fellow travelers reintegrate into a preestablished and guaranteed economy, Pinto remains on the margins of the system.

He reviews the works of the 1950s, which he perceives differently and acquire other and more complex meanings for him; to become fully aware of this and without any aesthetic project, supported by Laura, he resumes painting.
He perceives the sense of a new awareness of the destiny of his painting vocation.

In 1966, critically aware of the “reasons” that caused the failure of the artistic experiments practiced by the historical avant-gardes, and completely indifferent to the artificial ideologies of the artistic climate of those years, urged on by a strong mental and emotional tension, he began to work overwhelmed by problems, stimuli, presentiments and forebodings; he experienced the violent ambivalence between anguish and hope.

Thus he writes: “I was working hard and with effort. I could bring the work to a conclusion indifferently now in one direction now in another, but I perceived that the real effort consisted in trying to avoid concluding it in images that I did not feel corresponded to the truest, if obscure, needs for authentic ‘transcendence’ of the existential chaos that I experienced daily in my public and private life.
When I had a number of works, I felt the need to show them, on Sundays we began by opening the door of the house to anyone who wanted to enter. This was also the way to start selling them.”

Pinto begins to show his work to militant critics of his age, he writes: “I perceived an unbridgeable estrangement between my approach to the problems experienced by the experiences of the historical avant-garde (Mondrian, Kandinsky, Picasso, Breton, Duchamp) and theirs. However, it was essential to expose the work to verify its foundation. I happened to have in my hands the book Mondrian and the Art of the Twentieth Century by C. L. Ragghianti. In ’70 I went to Florence to show him the work.”
From that moment his pictorial vocation found its objectification in the support of admirers and collectors; Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti curated his first major solo exhibition in December 1971 at “La Strozzina” in Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, which was repeated in 1972 at the Centro di Attività Visive in Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara (directed by Franco Farina), then at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice (desired by Giuseppe Mazzariol), as well as, again in 1972, at the Centro di Iniziative Culturali in Pordenone, coordinated by architect Glauco Glesleri (crf. solo exhibitions).
With Luigi Bellini’s “Idea” Gallery in Florence he has his first contract.

His meeting with the young Lorenzo Sassoli de Bianchi in the mid-1970s inaugurates a long, industrious and fruitful association. Sassoli took an interest in Pinto’s human and artistic story; thus began an intense frequentation, animated by mutual esteem and solidarity.

Many encounters and acquaintances accompanied him in his tireless search for an authentic anthropological identity; these included Julius Evola, Ezra Pound, Giulio Carlo Argan, Lucio Pozzi, Luciano Nanni, Patrizia Vicinelli, Massimo Cacciari, Omar Calabrese, Michele Ranchetti, Giancarlo Gaeta, and Marck di Suvero.

Also decisive is the friendship, as well as the long association, with Sergio Vuskovic Rojo (philosopher and former Mayor of Valparaiso, Chile) whose description of the “mental” places he experienced during torture in Pinochet’s prisons is illuminating: it corroborates Pinto’s pictorial research. Vuskovic Rojo’s experience during torture allows him to take on with greater awareness and determination the meaning of his aesthetic-anthropological research; Sergio’s phenomenological analysis of Bruno’s pictorial work is significant: ” … your work takes the form of qualitative perceptions that in the limiting moment of your effort represent the ultimate threshold of vital experience, and this is commonly called a state of grace.”(cf. “Parol. Notebooks of Art and Epistemology,” No. 3. March 1987 In Figure of Demon). Vuskovic Rojo’s experience describes an existential situation at the “limit,” similar to that realized by the strongest experiments of Modern Poetry.

Between 1980 and 1982 he stayed for long periods in New York as a guest in the studio of the sculptor Mark di Suvero, whom he had met in Venice in 1972.
In New York Pinto in 1981 exhibited his work at the Sutton Gallery.
His meeting with Dore Ashton, who was working on the book “The Legend of Modern Art,” enabled him to understand the absolute transcendent uniqueness of Cézanne’s work, which from that moment on would become the fulcrum around which all reflections on the destiny of the art of painting from Giotto to the present day would be articulated; a practice of painting experienced as an instrument of knowledge of the realities experienced in the world outside and inside the ego, and of the sense of the relationships existing between one and the other.

In New York he also met Lucio Pozzi with whom he established an intense dialogue on the contemporary artistic condition; Pozzi would later publish the contents of their meetings in a monographic issue of his magazine New Observations. Art and Culture.

In 1997 the Valsamoggia Equal Opportunities Commission promoted within the project “Discovering Difference” a debate in which the experience of aesthetic education conducted in the 1970s by Bruno Pinto in Monteveglio elementary schools was also presented. The presentation was held at the Istituto Gramsci in Bologna, with the participation of Giano Accame, Alberto Abruzzese, Vittorio Telmon, Giancarla Codrignani and Suor Marcella Farina.
Thus was born the purpose of founding at the Abbey of Monteveglio a Cultural Association, “Monteveglio Observations,” with Pinto as president and Letizia Lambertini, Marina Massa and Don Gianni Cova as founding members. In the same year, the Association set up the training workshop for adults Art – Making – Seeing at the artist’s studio.

On this occasion Pinto met the kindergarten teacher Gianna Poli, who was interested in the problems of Modern Art presented in the workshop and decided to deepen them by supporting an individual path that lasted three years in the painter’s studio; as a result of this experience, the need arose to communicate in the practice of daily work what she understood and experienced: a long and intense collaboration began that saw the artistic path led by the teacher as a teaching tool within the school institution starting from kindergarten. They carry out several Aesthetic Education and Artistic Practice Workshops whose work is presented in 2001 at a conference attended by the University of Bologna.

They founded in 2005, together with the artist’s daughter Bianca Maria, the Cultural Association “L’Uovo d’Oro” and presented the work made in kindergarten during the International Day of Children’s Rights in Casalecchio di Reno (Bo) promoted by the Pedagogical Documentation Center and the Councillor for Educational Policies, with the participation of Benedetta Davalli and Mauro Speraggi. In 2006 they are called upon to carry out a Workshop on the art of Bruno Pinto at the Italian Maria Montessori School in Barcelona on the occasion of the Celebration of the European Day for which the children have to make the works of European Contemporary Artists.

Also in those years, the Department of Culture of the City of Bologna, with Roberto Grandi, sponsored the event promoted by Antonio Loffreda “The Beginning as Origin. With and around Bruno Pinto,” in the spaces of “Le Stanze,” with the intervention of Valerio Dehò, Giancarlo Gaeta, Roberto Grandi, Glauco Glesleri, and Luciano Nanni, and with an installation by sculptor and friend Flavio Favelli.

In 2002 the Bank of Bologna purchased two paintings and a sculpture by Pinto.

In the same year Giampiero Giacomini, a friend and collector for more than thirty-five years, publicly proposed himself as his “patron and supporter” and promoted at the Union Camere of Bologna the purchase of several of Pinto’s works.

In 2003 the Fondazione della Cassa di Risparmio di Bologna purchases a work by Pinto

In September of the same year, Pinto’s solo exhibition, curated by Peter Weiermaier, “After Silence,” was held at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Bologna, as part of which a series of four meetings was organized featuring art critics, economists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, theologians, philosophers and anthropologists.

In this circumstance, the difficulties of the patron friend, troubled by violent ambivalence toward the commitment made, appear more clearly to Pinto. Giacomini does not understand the nature of the extraneousness of Pinto’s work from the logics of production and commercial promotion of contemporary art, which he himself seeks to pursue uncritically.

In February 2005 Pinto exhibited in Arte Fiera Bologna, with Bruno Grossetti’s Milan gallery.

It was the Mazzotta Foundation that presented, between June and September of the same year, the first exhibition of a living artist, exhibiting Pinto’s work, “Facing and Through.” The exhibition, curated by Pietro Bellasi and Bruno Corà, is corroborated by authoritative testimonies from critics and art historians, the world of philosophy and theology, such as Remo Bodei, Piero Coda, Guido Magnaguagno, Giacomo Marramao, Marco Meneguzzo, and Jean Soldini, as well as from the directors of the museums of Hannover, Bonn and Basel. “The Temptation of the Abyss and the Possible Ascent. Bruno Pinto and Infinite Painting” is the emblematic and paradoxical title of Pietro Bellasi’s introductory essay: the exhibition does not, cannot have an “anthological” character since, as Bellasi observes one has “the impression that all of Pinto’s works, particularly the ‘recent’ ones, constitute, more than in any other artist I know, a unique and organic whole, articulated and integrated by the literally superhuman energy of a pictorial action that is an essential condition for transforming pure and simple ‘life’ into ‘existence,’ capable of knowing and generating Truth. […] a quest pursued to the utmost until the existential coincidence of pain and joy; a paradoxical coincidence that accompanies the unveiling of truth in painting as the vital presence of a dimension totally other than oneself.”

Happenings follow which, once again, disrupt the whole economy of his existence.

In the summer of 2006, he stayed, at the invitation of director Mohamed Zineddaine, for 3 months in Casablanca to participate as artistic director in the direction of his first film. Already in 2003, Mohamed interested in Pinto’s artistic – existential story, had made a feature film produced by Luca Morelli’s Asa Audiovisivi and proposed at the Locarno Film Festival.

In 2008 Pinto writes: “[…]I found myself faced with a situation that recurs emblematically in the course of my life; there has always been a moment when events force me to a new beginning, syncope. Unimaginable facts provoke a violent disenchantment of consciousness that, on closer inspection, was already confusingly and stubbornly pursued by me: at a certain moment it simply happens with the help of certain external conditions. It happens, it disrupts the whole economy of my existence, which is spontaneously forced to gather itself into a plexus of new tensions that project attention further, into a time-space all the more remote the more saturated with new forebodings: it also happens to re-cross without the mediation of the imaginary some places of the past, even the remote past, with the whole body of existence. It means perceiving with more immediate evidence the presence in me of the same constitutive conflictuality of forces that dominate the daily economy of everyone’s existence, those powers that violently agitate the ego obsessed with the demonic, inexhaustible desire to want to transcend them […]. Destiny: it is through the daily practice of painting that I can succeed in containing and understanding the enigmatic, always dramatic reasons that govern it. If this happens one is reconfirmed in the meaning of our life, one breathes purer air again and the threatening clouds that always appear on the horizon instill less fear.”

On January 19, 2010, he divorced Laura Lanza.

Pinto in these difficult years is flanked by his partner Gianna Poli, a number of people who daily with their friendship share his existential difficulties, and his daughter Bianca Maria interested for some time already for personal reasons in her father’s work and in a deeper and more authentic understanding of their relationship. The daughter persevering in her commitment to understand and support the principles that have always animated her father’s work and relationships, began a collaboration with him, committing herself to preserve, promote and exhibit his work. From 2010 to 2011 they held several solo exhibitions.

In 2011 he left Monteveglio, moved to Sasso Marconi and on June 14 of that year in the town of Assisi married Gianna Poli.

Soon after, they set off on an itinerant journey through European art capitals. After the last five years of almost total interruption of his work, visiting and revisiting places and works that are at the origin of his artistic history has allowed Pinto to perceive with greater immediate clarity the significance of some crucial, unexpected events in his artistic – existential journey that reconfirm the sense of his own destiny: the title of the exhibition at the Mazzotta Foundation “in front of and through” was an omen ?!

On October 11, after years of correspondence, Bruno met Eugenio Borgna in Novara, the city in which he had lived as a boy for a year to attend the Rinascita boarding school.

On January 12, 2012, the Alma Mater Studiorum of Bologna pays tribute to Pinto: a participatory and emotional meeting, arising from the donation to the Alma Mater Studiorum of Bologna of Pinto’s painting “Supper in Emmaus – Table Talks “from 1987, which took place in the presence of Rector Ivano Dionigi, the theologian and Dean of the “Sophia” University Institute Piero Coda and Lorenzo Sassoli de’ Bianchi, president of MAMbo, Museum of Modern Art of Bologna; an event that sees them together again after many years apart, an event within the event.

In February 2012, he participated in the debate regarding the CASTA of ‘ART and chose Affaritaliani.it to send a letter to Sgarbi.

In that same year, his daughter Bianca Maria met the poet, artist and director Stefano Massari, starting a new artistic and intellectual collaboration that led to the creation of an exhibition in SPAZIOARTE CARTA|BIANCA in Bazzano (BO), and a video interview “Bruno Pinto, Knowledge and Destiny” made by the writer and art critic Pier Damiano Ori. Collaboration that inaugurates a series of cultural and exhibition projects around the work of Bruno Pinto: at the Galleria D’Arte Contemporanea of Palazzo Ducale in Pavullo nel Frignano “BRUNO PINTO | CARTE,” curated by Paolo Donini and Stefano Massari also present in the scientific committee together with Pier Damiano Ori and Maura Pozzati. This was followed by an exhibition of unpublished paintings on paper by Bruno Pinto “BODIES AND ORIGIN – nudes on paper” Centro Culturale IL GRANAIO Fusignano (RA), an exhibition reproduced on the occasion of ARTEFIERA 2013 in Bologna.

In November 2012 Pinto’s work is on the cover of philosopher and friend Jean Soldini’s new book “Head Down. For an Ontology of Life in Common,” released in Milan in Mimesis Editions; three pages are devoted entirely to the work to the artist.

In October 2014 he had the opportunity to meet after several years with a close friend of his, Chilean philosopher and politician Sergio Vuskovic Rojo.

In April 2015 Lorenzo Sassoli de Bianchi donated to MAMbo the painting “Il Ceppo,” an oil on canvas from 1966, particularly significant in the evolution of Pinto’s research. On the occasion of this special exhibition event, the Museum of Modern Art of Bologna dedicates a focus to it within the Permanent Collection in the presence of Lorenzo Sassoli de Bianchi, Gianfranco Maraniello – respectively President and Director of the Istituzione Bologna Musei – and the Magnifico Rettore of the University of Bologna, Ivano Dionigi.

In October 2016 Bruno Pinto returned, after years, to ‘La Valle’ a place where he decided his life would be dedicated to painting and subsequently making “Il Ceppo.” It is on this occasion that Roberto Cerè shoots the docufilm Ascoltare il silenzio, tracce di Bruno Pinto, produced by Mille Colline, in which Bruno tells Valerio Dehò and Fabio Sgarzi, a collector and friend, about the life choices he made then and traces his relationship with painting.

Another significant meeting takes place in Florence in March 2018 with Giacomo Ragghianti, son of art critic and historian Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, who curated his first major solo exhibitions in the 1970s.

In these years Pinto works, “Gianna, when I look at the sky, the fields, the trees I perceive them as it has never happened to me they instill in me a great hope, even in certain moments that I look at you a hope is born in me an unjustifiable but real joy as it had never happened to me.[…] The difficulties that we have to face I believe regenerate our life, even in the work I feel that there are conditions to make it grow we both have to support each other with great living hope.”

At the same time, a Cultural Association is established, which supported by members and collaborators, including critic Valerio Dehò and collector Fabio Sgarzi, is committed to promoting, preserving and protecting all his artistic work. The Association takes care of the archiving of works and historical material, publications related to exhibitions, events and press reviews, and photographic and epistolary material. It provides for the preservation of the aforementioned material by also making it available for consultation at its headquarters for study purposes. Collaborates in the creation of exhibitions, catalogs and other cultural initiatives. L’archiviazione è finalizzata alla redazione del Catalogo Generale come strumento di ricostruzione documentaria, filologica e storica dell’opera dell’artista.

On the afternoon of November 24, Pinto died suddenly in Sasso Marconi during one of his beloved walks in the company of his wife Gianna. Mass was celebrated on Nov. 29 at Chiesanuova in Bologna by his dear friend Giandomenico Cova, who, thanks to Bruno’s authentic acquaintance from long, frequent and deep conversations, greeted him by dedicating to him the readings from the prophet Jeremiah 17:7-10 and the gospel of John 12:20-28.

The last years he left traces of his thoughts in a diary he shared with his wife, in the last pages is written: “Let us wish each morning that the loving spirit governs our day. Let us pray: let work be a prayer.” Bruno Pinto