When you talk about someone, it is better to start with his grandparents, parents, with his kind of growing and childhood. In Michele’s case, his story is so romantic that it may even appear to have been romanticized. Zina, young and matronly, loves painting, she attended an Art school in Moscow and then, following the advice of her Academy teacher, leaves to go to Italy were she aims to follow the lessons of a famous Master in Rome. So she departs with eight trunks and her lady companion. She takes some days holiday and Portofino is recommended to be a place of great beauty. As she was waiting for an interpreter  in the hotel hall, she meets a journalist who was actually supposed to be in London for an international political meeting. A telephone call from the secret services had exonerated him from attending, because of a too dangerous situation and so he had departed from Switzerland by car, an Isotta Fraschini and had arrived in Portofino.  And here starts the idyll between the young Russian and Zina, an union that produces the three magnificent brothers.

One of them is Ivan, Michele’s father. He decides to become a pilot in order to see and paint the Earth from the sky and so follow his mother’s passion for paintings. That is why, starting from his childhood, his father takes him around different museums in Italy and in Europe to meet personally some of the most famous artists. In this way he sharpens his taste and his sensitivity and whenever he shares his impressions with his father Ivan, his father is surprised by the sharpness of his gaze.

So he starts expressing himself passionately through the use of colours and he starts drawing on every kind of material he can finds, on wood, on an exercise book, on a pieces of paper. He will carry on doing this all his life, continuing once he starts working as a graphic designer, too.His childhood was marked by the discovery of ruins of the second world war in the historic centre of Milan, which were still standing after so many years. Since he was living close to them, he often tried to run away from home to wander between the rubbles and collect small finds. Also the antagonism between him and the elder brother, his mother’s, aunt’s and grandmother’s favourite, leads him to close himself in his own world, that gets richer and richer, deeper and passionate. Anyhow a melancholy world that is very well depicted by his father in the two portraits he dedicates him in those years.  As a child, Michele used to create rather cubists clothes made of paper and fabrics for his sister’s dolls, his playmate. Growing up he keeps on being reflective and meditative and spends whole days rowing on the Lake Como, fishing and then throwing the fishes back into the lake.