Falò sotto i Pini

This Falò sotto i Pini wallpaper began as a night-watch painting, worked in flat, decisive brushstrokes in the Storybook Gouache style, the gouache painting that fills illustrated books and keeps the living mark of the brush on the paper.

Let me say plainly what I see: a small camp of triangular canvas tents, their flaps rolled up and their guy ropes taut, set in a half-circle around a tall bonfire whose flames are pointed, overlapping shapes, ringed by round stones and by logs that serve as seats. Three or four conical pines keep watch at the sides, tall as sentries, and behind them stretches a low line of hills under a dark, deep sky. Every shape is a single, decided field of colour — the indigo of the night, the grey-green of the pines, the amber and warm yellow of the fire, the dusty cream of the canvas — laid down in one loaded brushstroke, so that the grain of the paper stays visible beneath the colour.

Close up the hand-painted details appear: small white touches for the stars, a thread of smoke curling above the fire, orange sparks thrown upwards, the streaks of the brush inside the crowns of the pines. It is a calm, welcoming scene, the one this Falò sotto i Pini wallpaper carries with it into any child's room, like a page that never stops telling its story. In the WallZad workshop we choose pigments and printing that keep every brushstroke with the same craft care with which it was made, so that beauty deserves to last in a child's room too.