joseph engraver
11-18-2025, 05:45 AM
The next morning I got up early and used the clean communal shower located down the hall from my second floor accommodations. Hungrily I ate the fruit I purchased the day before.
The Albergo Gardone bar was open and doing brisk business at 7 a.m.
The owner’s wife was behind the bar fixing espresso coffee served with a shot of
Brandy or grappa to the workers, most of whom worked for Beretta.
“Come have coffee and a brioche or a sandwich.” She said to me, with a kindly
smile”.
I accepted espresso coffee and the grappa; it was rich, black, and full of flavor and tasted nothing like the weak, instant coffee that I was accustomed to drinking, especially with a splash of grappa
.
Fortified with enough caffeine to increase my heartbeat, I headed off for my
first day of school.
I decided that the only possible way to survive was accept no charity.
I would not ask for food, money, or help, I would earn money somehow.
As I made the hour-long hike through Gardone and up the mountainside to
the town of Magno and Signor Giovanelli’s school, I wondered how I would survive.
I had to find a job; I needed to make some money. I decided to do portraits after school. I was sure I could find a way.
January 23, 1982 (From my journal)
Engraving school is wonderful. Six hours of design and drawing lessons a week.
Hours and hours of cutting smaller and smaller circles on practice plates, everyone is nice to me. I know with perspiration, perseverance, and patience I will master this art of engraving.
Loneliness and cold are my biggest enemies. Somehow, they seem to go
hand in hand. Maybe someday it will all be worthwhile.
Look after me.
“LEARNING THE STROKES”
Engraving school left little time to think and rehash in my mind what I would have done differently in my past.
Slowly, I started to come out of my depression; I felt my spirits starting to lift again. I became totally absorbed in school. I had the world’s finest teachers. Signor Giovanelli placed me under the direct supervision of Maestro Renato Sanzogni, the thin, bearded, redheaded man, who was fifteen years my junior. Renato worked directly on my right, he taught me how to hold the chisel and hammer properly, how to stand correctly in front of the vise, and how to make a handheld graver cut steel with surgical precision.
I was doing well with the Italian language, and making progress learning how to
use the small, delicate, chasing hammer.
The first thing I had to learn was to be able to make a solid contact with the
hammer s face against the chisel. Every stroke had to be precise or the delicate
point of the engraving chisel would break.
Once the point broke it would no longer cut properly and would have to be re-sharpened. A process done under 6-power magnification and could take a novice up to thirty minutes to complete.
It was three months before I learned to make a perfect stroke with the hammerhead
against the graver. The beginning was agony, I would swing the hammer
twice and the point would break, I would have to re-sharpen.
Day after day, I stood in front of that vise, seven hours a day, five and a half day a week, trying to connect with the end of the chisel without looking at the hammer fall.
After three weeks of continuous practice, I could cut a semi-straight line three
inches long in a steel practice block. Line after line, each equal thickness, and
width apart I cut into the practice block. When its surface was covered, I would
show it to the Maestro. He would examine it, send it to the machine shop where
the work was milled off, and the clean block then brought back.
I would then place it in the vise, polish the block to a smooth luster, and begin filling it again with fine lines.
I stood on that stone tile floor of the engraving room, cutting line after line until I could do it with absolute precision, standing in those damned cowboy boots, day after day, while the arches of my feet begged for relief from the pain caused by standing in one spot for such long periods …
From my journal
January 26th, 1982
To Whom It May Concern, I have been told this day I could not become an engraver because of my age.
I will become a master before two more years come to pass.
I will teach, I will have my dreams of a home and loves become true.
I know this in my heart.
Today I had my vision checked, new glasses are required, must sell all the rest of my tool´s to survive these difficult times.
Money enough for one more week of hotel rent.
Eating well, gaining back my weight. Sleeping well, but still lonely and after school I am cold and bored.
I am washing my clothes in the bathtub, drawing sketches to pay for meals.
Boot´s still hurting my feet, but where there is a will, there is a way.
The hotel owner is a nice and kindly concerned person; I explained to him that at the rate my money is going I will soon run out of funds.
He has moved me out of my second floor room and up into the attic, I can sleep there for no charge. I have gratefully made the move even if the shower is but a drizzle of very cold water.
Although he was kind and concerned, the innkeeper wasn’t about to give away
the keys to his castle. I had to be in the room by 11 p.m. when he would close
the iron curtains and lock the place up for the night.
The family that owned the Albergo Gardone are very typical Italian. Clean, well dressed, well nourished, and with a cheerful disposition toward life and labor. Their sense of family was something I could not comprehend; I had spent 42 years with selfish, mean spirited, cruel, unloving people. Suddenly I was among people who loved passionately, openly, and unselfishly.
I felt now that I had really died, and Italy was a place for me to be reborn.
I felt I was like an intruder. I was so different. I had worked at so many various types of employment. I had no sense of family, and had so very little happiness in my affairs with women that I was considering an alternate sexual lifestyle.
I came to believe that women were kin to black widow spiders, spinning their tender webs of lies and deceit.
I thought of myself as a wolf that had been wounded, once by cupid’s arrow when
I was young then a second time by a beautiful trapper with red hair.
She, who had deceived me, took my small savings and left with a man she met in a bar.
January 24th, 1982
Dear Universal Mind,
Last night I had a dream. I was running, laughing, holding hands with someone,
a woman, there were children in the room, boys and girls, black, white and yellow, I was their teacher and they were waiting for me to arrive.
They were also happy and smiling. Then I awoke here in this cold lonely attic.
The dream only a pleasant memory, it was 6 a.m. and I cried. I cried because the dream was over. Never had I felt as happy as I did in that dream.
That same evening after the dream, I entered the Albergo bar.
The owner, Pietro Dominici was at his usual place behind the bar dispensing grappa, whiskey and coffee.
He greeted me with a big smile. I think he was proud to have me as his guest. After all, the whole town of Gardone knew of the Americano who had entered Giovanelli’s school of engraving.
“Come eat something,” he would say. My answer was always the same.
“No, Signore, you give me work and then I will eat.”
Soon I was waiting tables and doing the general maintenance around the
hotel.
Pietro was very concerned about me; he bought several of my sketches.
One evening while I was sitting near the bar drawing A man entered. And then
there were many “Ciaos,” embraces and kisses by the other workers. Pietro introduced me to a strong, bearded man, dressed in brown woolens, hunting jacket, and wearing a green alpine cap. Pietro explained that this man was a great artist and he was willing to give me a job.
I was overjoyed; I would have a part time job working for a famous artist. Finally, after more explaining, I understood he was a taxidermist.
Taxidermy was right up my alley and a much-needed experience to help with my
engraving career.
I was to start working for him the following evening after school. After asking several times for directions to this new job, making sure that I understood exactly where the place was, I retired for the night with great expectations for the next day.
School was going well, or at least better. I sold the vise that I had dragged halfway
around the world to my teacher Renato and bought a new pair of eyeglasses.
I had learned to speak and understand some Italian, enough to survive.
For the first two weeks of school, I ate no lunch because I did not understand that the school had its own cafeteria with good lunches for workers and students.
One momentous day, a very wealthy, important looking man was touring
the school; he was Italian but spoke perfect English. Signor Giovanelli brought
this man over to my workstation to look at the practice plate I was engraving. After afew brief questions, the man explained about the cafeteria, I could eat there for $2 a meal. I told him that I had no money extra for lunch. To that, the man
replied that he, meaning Signor Giovanelli, would like me to eat as his guest.
Those lunches not only gave me the nourishment needed, but introduced me
to the flavors of Northern Italian cooking.
Signor Giovanelli’ provided me with food, the food I needed to survive. At lunch each day, I would try to be the last served. I would delay my departure until all of the students, workers, and staff finished and departed. Leaving the cafeteria empty, then I would then go around to their plates, stuffing the left over scraps into my jacket pockets for that night’s dinner.
I was expecting this newfound job with the taxidermist would provide some
desperately needed lira.
That afternoon when school let out I accepted a ride down the mountain into the town of Gardone with another of the teachers, Giulio Timpini;
Giulio was the master engraver for Beretta. He had started engraving at the
age of 11 and was at my age when we first met at school. Signor Timpini would
come to the school every Saturday to spend time with each student.
He was a genius with a hammer and a chisel. He was a man I loved and admired and it caused me much sadness when I learned that he passed away last year.
Students had a practice plate to do their special work, we could work on those
plate´s Saturday afternoons. Maestro Timpini would spend time with us, showing
us mistakes, and giving instructions on the many techniques that are part of engravers varied skills. He instructed us in the art of gold inlay and gold overlay.
He showed us the techniques for coin sculpture, under his guidance I learned to
cut script, inlay lettering, layout, design, everything.
Under Signor Timpini’s gentle guidance, my work took great steps forward.
Thanking Giulio, I got out of his car and walked across Via Bernardelli to the
Taxidermy shop.
Its display windows showed the maestro’s skills, mounted wild boar, ibex, doves, wild turkeys, chipmunks, and lions, all sorts of animals
mounted and preserved for the contemplation of their killers.
For me, a learning artist, I could think of no better place to study wildlife.
I entered the shop and found the maestro at work preparing a bull’s head for mounting. It looked fascinating with long tattered ears, eyes black as coal and sneering expression. I could sense the rage or imagine a toreador impaled on the tip of one of its black horns, for a brief second I thought about taxidermy for a career.
The maestro was a man of few words. It was cold outside but the shop was very warm. I removed my coat and cap, and hung them on the rack by the door. We shook hands then he led me into another room.
Hanging from the cement ceiling by a rusting meat hook was the severed head
of a wild boar. The smell of it was so strong I could hardly control my stomach.
“I can do this,” I thought to myself.
The maestro picked up a sharp knife and began cutting the flesh away from
the skin, indicating to me to take the knife and begin. He handed the sharpening
stone and the knife to me then pointed to the dead boar’s staring eyes, showing
me to be careful in cutting those lifeless orbs out, along with lips, ears, and snout.
I had no problems dressing out the head, I was a country boy, but man oh man, the
smell. I would cut a bit of flesh away, gag, recover, and then do it again. Three hours later the naked skull of putrid flesh was hanging from the hook. The maestro
picked up the hide, looked it over and found the work satisfactory, paid me
20.000 lira then pointed to the frozen, bloated body of a fox he had removed
from the freezer.
He indicated that it would be ready for me the next evening.
The next day at school I could not concentrate. I kept thinking about that
defrosting fox, waiting for me at the taxidermist’s shop. Lunchtime came. I could not eat. The cursed boots had rubbed my little toe so raw that it had become infected.
That night I explained that I could not cut the fox.
Did the maestro have other work? Perhaps I could build the frames for his masterpieces. I sold him my wood carving chisels. They were the last of the tools that I had made. I have always had a passion for hand tools. Those woodworking chisels were my pride. I was very saddened by the necessary sale.
February 20th, 1982
Today I almost gave up, thinking too much about home. Sometimes
I wonder if I am sane. It would be so easy to quit, get a good job and work for
money.
To put my brain in neutral, stop thinking, join the great society of the complacent herds.
However, when I look and see how others live or exist, I cannot bring myself to live that way. I will not give up and am determined to learn this noble art of engraving.
The Albergo Gardone bar was open and doing brisk business at 7 a.m.
The owner’s wife was behind the bar fixing espresso coffee served with a shot of
Brandy or grappa to the workers, most of whom worked for Beretta.
“Come have coffee and a brioche or a sandwich.” She said to me, with a kindly
smile”.
I accepted espresso coffee and the grappa; it was rich, black, and full of flavor and tasted nothing like the weak, instant coffee that I was accustomed to drinking, especially with a splash of grappa
.
Fortified with enough caffeine to increase my heartbeat, I headed off for my
first day of school.
I decided that the only possible way to survive was accept no charity.
I would not ask for food, money, or help, I would earn money somehow.
As I made the hour-long hike through Gardone and up the mountainside to
the town of Magno and Signor Giovanelli’s school, I wondered how I would survive.
I had to find a job; I needed to make some money. I decided to do portraits after school. I was sure I could find a way.
January 23, 1982 (From my journal)
Engraving school is wonderful. Six hours of design and drawing lessons a week.
Hours and hours of cutting smaller and smaller circles on practice plates, everyone is nice to me. I know with perspiration, perseverance, and patience I will master this art of engraving.
Loneliness and cold are my biggest enemies. Somehow, they seem to go
hand in hand. Maybe someday it will all be worthwhile.
Look after me.
“LEARNING THE STROKES”
Engraving school left little time to think and rehash in my mind what I would have done differently in my past.
Slowly, I started to come out of my depression; I felt my spirits starting to lift again. I became totally absorbed in school. I had the world’s finest teachers. Signor Giovanelli placed me under the direct supervision of Maestro Renato Sanzogni, the thin, bearded, redheaded man, who was fifteen years my junior. Renato worked directly on my right, he taught me how to hold the chisel and hammer properly, how to stand correctly in front of the vise, and how to make a handheld graver cut steel with surgical precision.
I was doing well with the Italian language, and making progress learning how to
use the small, delicate, chasing hammer.
The first thing I had to learn was to be able to make a solid contact with the
hammer s face against the chisel. Every stroke had to be precise or the delicate
point of the engraving chisel would break.
Once the point broke it would no longer cut properly and would have to be re-sharpened. A process done under 6-power magnification and could take a novice up to thirty minutes to complete.
It was three months before I learned to make a perfect stroke with the hammerhead
against the graver. The beginning was agony, I would swing the hammer
twice and the point would break, I would have to re-sharpen.
Day after day, I stood in front of that vise, seven hours a day, five and a half day a week, trying to connect with the end of the chisel without looking at the hammer fall.
After three weeks of continuous practice, I could cut a semi-straight line three
inches long in a steel practice block. Line after line, each equal thickness, and
width apart I cut into the practice block. When its surface was covered, I would
show it to the Maestro. He would examine it, send it to the machine shop where
the work was milled off, and the clean block then brought back.
I would then place it in the vise, polish the block to a smooth luster, and begin filling it again with fine lines.
I stood on that stone tile floor of the engraving room, cutting line after line until I could do it with absolute precision, standing in those damned cowboy boots, day after day, while the arches of my feet begged for relief from the pain caused by standing in one spot for such long periods …
From my journal
January 26th, 1982
To Whom It May Concern, I have been told this day I could not become an engraver because of my age.
I will become a master before two more years come to pass.
I will teach, I will have my dreams of a home and loves become true.
I know this in my heart.
Today I had my vision checked, new glasses are required, must sell all the rest of my tool´s to survive these difficult times.
Money enough for one more week of hotel rent.
Eating well, gaining back my weight. Sleeping well, but still lonely and after school I am cold and bored.
I am washing my clothes in the bathtub, drawing sketches to pay for meals.
Boot´s still hurting my feet, but where there is a will, there is a way.
The hotel owner is a nice and kindly concerned person; I explained to him that at the rate my money is going I will soon run out of funds.
He has moved me out of my second floor room and up into the attic, I can sleep there for no charge. I have gratefully made the move even if the shower is but a drizzle of very cold water.
Although he was kind and concerned, the innkeeper wasn’t about to give away
the keys to his castle. I had to be in the room by 11 p.m. when he would close
the iron curtains and lock the place up for the night.
The family that owned the Albergo Gardone are very typical Italian. Clean, well dressed, well nourished, and with a cheerful disposition toward life and labor. Their sense of family was something I could not comprehend; I had spent 42 years with selfish, mean spirited, cruel, unloving people. Suddenly I was among people who loved passionately, openly, and unselfishly.
I felt now that I had really died, and Italy was a place for me to be reborn.
I felt I was like an intruder. I was so different. I had worked at so many various types of employment. I had no sense of family, and had so very little happiness in my affairs with women that I was considering an alternate sexual lifestyle.
I came to believe that women were kin to black widow spiders, spinning their tender webs of lies and deceit.
I thought of myself as a wolf that had been wounded, once by cupid’s arrow when
I was young then a second time by a beautiful trapper with red hair.
She, who had deceived me, took my small savings and left with a man she met in a bar.
January 24th, 1982
Dear Universal Mind,
Last night I had a dream. I was running, laughing, holding hands with someone,
a woman, there were children in the room, boys and girls, black, white and yellow, I was their teacher and they were waiting for me to arrive.
They were also happy and smiling. Then I awoke here in this cold lonely attic.
The dream only a pleasant memory, it was 6 a.m. and I cried. I cried because the dream was over. Never had I felt as happy as I did in that dream.
That same evening after the dream, I entered the Albergo bar.
The owner, Pietro Dominici was at his usual place behind the bar dispensing grappa, whiskey and coffee.
He greeted me with a big smile. I think he was proud to have me as his guest. After all, the whole town of Gardone knew of the Americano who had entered Giovanelli’s school of engraving.
“Come eat something,” he would say. My answer was always the same.
“No, Signore, you give me work and then I will eat.”
Soon I was waiting tables and doing the general maintenance around the
hotel.
Pietro was very concerned about me; he bought several of my sketches.
One evening while I was sitting near the bar drawing A man entered. And then
there were many “Ciaos,” embraces and kisses by the other workers. Pietro introduced me to a strong, bearded man, dressed in brown woolens, hunting jacket, and wearing a green alpine cap. Pietro explained that this man was a great artist and he was willing to give me a job.
I was overjoyed; I would have a part time job working for a famous artist. Finally, after more explaining, I understood he was a taxidermist.
Taxidermy was right up my alley and a much-needed experience to help with my
engraving career.
I was to start working for him the following evening after school. After asking several times for directions to this new job, making sure that I understood exactly where the place was, I retired for the night with great expectations for the next day.
School was going well, or at least better. I sold the vise that I had dragged halfway
around the world to my teacher Renato and bought a new pair of eyeglasses.
I had learned to speak and understand some Italian, enough to survive.
For the first two weeks of school, I ate no lunch because I did not understand that the school had its own cafeteria with good lunches for workers and students.
One momentous day, a very wealthy, important looking man was touring
the school; he was Italian but spoke perfect English. Signor Giovanelli brought
this man over to my workstation to look at the practice plate I was engraving. After afew brief questions, the man explained about the cafeteria, I could eat there for $2 a meal. I told him that I had no money extra for lunch. To that, the man
replied that he, meaning Signor Giovanelli, would like me to eat as his guest.
Those lunches not only gave me the nourishment needed, but introduced me
to the flavors of Northern Italian cooking.
Signor Giovanelli’ provided me with food, the food I needed to survive. At lunch each day, I would try to be the last served. I would delay my departure until all of the students, workers, and staff finished and departed. Leaving the cafeteria empty, then I would then go around to their plates, stuffing the left over scraps into my jacket pockets for that night’s dinner.
I was expecting this newfound job with the taxidermist would provide some
desperately needed lira.
That afternoon when school let out I accepted a ride down the mountain into the town of Gardone with another of the teachers, Giulio Timpini;
Giulio was the master engraver for Beretta. He had started engraving at the
age of 11 and was at my age when we first met at school. Signor Timpini would
come to the school every Saturday to spend time with each student.
He was a genius with a hammer and a chisel. He was a man I loved and admired and it caused me much sadness when I learned that he passed away last year.
Students had a practice plate to do their special work, we could work on those
plate´s Saturday afternoons. Maestro Timpini would spend time with us, showing
us mistakes, and giving instructions on the many techniques that are part of engravers varied skills. He instructed us in the art of gold inlay and gold overlay.
He showed us the techniques for coin sculpture, under his guidance I learned to
cut script, inlay lettering, layout, design, everything.
Under Signor Timpini’s gentle guidance, my work took great steps forward.
Thanking Giulio, I got out of his car and walked across Via Bernardelli to the
Taxidermy shop.
Its display windows showed the maestro’s skills, mounted wild boar, ibex, doves, wild turkeys, chipmunks, and lions, all sorts of animals
mounted and preserved for the contemplation of their killers.
For me, a learning artist, I could think of no better place to study wildlife.
I entered the shop and found the maestro at work preparing a bull’s head for mounting. It looked fascinating with long tattered ears, eyes black as coal and sneering expression. I could sense the rage or imagine a toreador impaled on the tip of one of its black horns, for a brief second I thought about taxidermy for a career.
The maestro was a man of few words. It was cold outside but the shop was very warm. I removed my coat and cap, and hung them on the rack by the door. We shook hands then he led me into another room.
Hanging from the cement ceiling by a rusting meat hook was the severed head
of a wild boar. The smell of it was so strong I could hardly control my stomach.
“I can do this,” I thought to myself.
The maestro picked up a sharp knife and began cutting the flesh away from
the skin, indicating to me to take the knife and begin. He handed the sharpening
stone and the knife to me then pointed to the dead boar’s staring eyes, showing
me to be careful in cutting those lifeless orbs out, along with lips, ears, and snout.
I had no problems dressing out the head, I was a country boy, but man oh man, the
smell. I would cut a bit of flesh away, gag, recover, and then do it again. Three hours later the naked skull of putrid flesh was hanging from the hook. The maestro
picked up the hide, looked it over and found the work satisfactory, paid me
20.000 lira then pointed to the frozen, bloated body of a fox he had removed
from the freezer.
He indicated that it would be ready for me the next evening.
The next day at school I could not concentrate. I kept thinking about that
defrosting fox, waiting for me at the taxidermist’s shop. Lunchtime came. I could not eat. The cursed boots had rubbed my little toe so raw that it had become infected.
That night I explained that I could not cut the fox.
Did the maestro have other work? Perhaps I could build the frames for his masterpieces. I sold him my wood carving chisels. They were the last of the tools that I had made. I have always had a passion for hand tools. Those woodworking chisels were my pride. I was very saddened by the necessary sale.
February 20th, 1982
Today I almost gave up, thinking too much about home. Sometimes
I wonder if I am sane. It would be so easy to quit, get a good job and work for
money.
To put my brain in neutral, stop thinking, join the great society of the complacent herds.
However, when I look and see how others live or exist, I cannot bring myself to live that way. I will not give up and am determined to learn this noble art of engraving.