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universe, feeling and experiencing its harmony. Right after the war in 1949 he obtained his first public recognition at the provincial photography show at Udine, winning third prize in his first competition. His confidence in his capacity and the soundness of his craft blossomed. He continuously sought to improve his mastery of the medium, preferring to train at home and observing photographers like the Brisighellis and Carlo Pignat (from Udine) who regularly supplied the Ciol studio every week. Photographers who at the time diffused the image of an archaic Friuli, bound to its traditions, their cultural referent also being the activity and studies of the Società filologica friulana that published the review Le Panarie, a society which drew the attention of someone else from Casarsa, Pasolini, with whom however Ciol had only sporadic contacts. In 1951 at Assisi for the first time Ciol took a capital step: a different perspective opened up, leading him to want to go beyond his own circumscribed habitat, while keeping the balance between Nature and Man of his homeland at the centre of his work. At Assisi the spiritual initiation coincided with the action of photography and an ascension to the Rocca was experienced as a revelation. Ascension as metaphor of an interior elevation which then led him to feel his commitment to his work ever more pressing. His relation with Nature evolved and the use of infrared film - discovered when buying second-hand material from the Allies - allowed him to achieve greater depth, opening the vision of his images onto a boundless spatial dimension, open onto a sense of infinity. His quest was for the harmony he perceived in the world and which should be expressed in photography, sustained by a profound religious feeling experienced as the sense of the creation and presence of the divine in the world. Ciol’s visual culture was formed in the places of his childhood and he drew vital sap from them for his work, in which he endlessly sought technical improvements. He used various cameras, the Hasselblad, an old brand but widespread after the war, the Super Ikonta, common by the 1930s, the Rolleicord in use at the same time, fine quality but less costly than the Rolleiflex. The pursuit of technical perfection aimed at expressing the sacred sentiment of Nature and time going by. Black and white with highly refined intermediary nuances was the option which most characterised him. It was only on approaching art works, but later, after the early 1960s and even more in the 1970s, that he took up the “challenge” of colour. But the exigency of perfection never led him to arid formal executions. He never fell into the decadence of the painterly style turned mannerist, still common in the 1940s, nor the mannerism - different but still the same thing - of a purely formalist research. He claimed, for example, that he tried to study Finazzi and his solarisations but precisely felt them to be “artifices.” During these years the list of his references became increasingly distinctive. In 1953 with some friends he founded the Circolo Casarese, active up to 1962, whose members aside from Ciol himself were Federico Castellani, Benito Scodeller, Italo Vagnarelli, Giovanni Castellarin, Olivo Gasparotto, all committed to giving a visual testimony of the peasant-world Friuli.23 Alistair Crawford, a Scottish painter, photographer and art historian whom Ciol met in the mid-1960s, compared him to Ansel Adams, which caused many in various essays about him to claim that his landscapes “show the influence of Adams,” as if Ciol could