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others to found the association for an artistic archive of the Friuli, an organic collection of photographs which then generated the 1971 Friuli regional law founding the Centro Regionale di Catalogazione e Restauro dei Beni Culturali of Villa Manin, subsequently essential for the preservation of works of art, in particular after the earthquake in 1976. Ciol became highly skilled in art photography, appreciated by scholars of the class of Pope Hennessy, above all for the photographs of Donatello’s sculptures in the Basilica di San’Antonio in Padua. This became a very important specialty for Ciol in his work in the subsequent years, but it should be said that this commitment already began in the 1950s, as solicitude for the traces of Man’s history and heightening of his “being in the world”, an attitude inspiring his entire work. These were years in which the tradition of a “craft” evolved into a permanent trait, furthered by his pursuit of extreme rigour in his work. This also led him to a partial isolation with respect to politically more engagé and “visible” trends. But his research was just as engagé: a pursuit of order, measure, putting Man back at the centre of the Earth and in the presence of the Universe, which arrests Time in values beyond Time and thereby universal. This choice is also reflected in his working method, unhurried and marked by slowness, a meditative attitude, always waiting for the right natural light for the best final result, perfect, meaning “accomplished.” And owing to this utterly incompatible with journalism photography and reportage. He is the ancient artifex who makes the perfection of his work a means of human and spiritual elevation. The photographs of these years presented here show friendships, the devastating loneliness of elders, hints of industrial transformations (1956). In 1957 the “journey South” brought accents of intense human feeling, especially in the photographs of children, of street life. The 1958 series opens with a superb photograph of Assisi followed by photographs with many shots of children, vivid portraits, solitary elders, men working, with a few pointers at current exhibitions as well (“Modernism”). In the next years, from 1959 on, wonderful photographs of children and elders become increasingly important, taken with deep respect and care, portraits steeped in a penetrating psychological intuition, in the attitudes, the faces, the gazes. In 1960 photographs of a trip to Lourdes were published: respectful of the place and of grief, they speak allusively, shots of vacant spaces, in the rain, or people absorbed in prayer. In 1961 he shifted his concern with the rural world to emigration (the railway station) and once again the life of children in the “campielli” of Chioggia. In 1961 his encounter with Luigi Crocenzi27 was crucial: his influence on the way of seeing images in sequences was considerable. This same year Ciol took part in the congress devoted to organisers of photography clubs, held at Meina (Novara), with lessons given by Tullio Savi, Luigi Crocenzi, Antonio Arcari, Alberto Steiner.28 Here Ciol was deeply impressed by Crocenzi’a speech and later on discovering his work with Elio Vittorini, most of all for Conversazioni in Sicilia in 1941. He understood that already linking the photographs at the time of the shot and then in the layout - however, a critical operation in which Crocenzi was his master - gave