Scilla

Houses pile up the hillside in blocks of orange, blue, ochre and green, stacked so tightly that roofs become walls and walls become roofs. This is Scilla, a fishing town on the Calabrian coast, painted by the Sicilian artist Renato Guttuso around 1950 (his signature and the date sit near the bottom edge). The dark headland in the middle is crowned by the Ruffo castle, and beyond it the sea opens out in bands of turquoise and white. Guttuso built the whole village out of simple geometric shapes, a habit he picked up from Picasso and Cézanne, but he kept the colors warm and the paint thick, so the place still feels sunbaked and lived in rather than purely abstract.

Scilla carries a famous name. Ancient sailors believed the monster Scylla lurked on this rock, snatching crewmen from passing ships, while the whirlpool Charybdis churned on the Sicilian side of the strait. Odysseus had to steer between them. Guttuso, born in Sicily just across the water, knew those stories well, though he was far more interested in the people who actually lived there: fishermen, laborers, families crammed into houses barely a few meters from the waves. A committed communist who spent the war in the anti-fascist resistance, he spent most of his career painting ordinary southern Italian life. Look at the bottom left and you will find a railing, as if the painter set up his easel on a terrace or balcony and simply recorded what was in front of him.