Emma Buzzacchi, better known as Mimì, was born in Medole (MN) on August 28, 1903, to Lorenzo and Pia Folegatti, who belonged to the agrarian bourgeoisie of Mantua.

From an early age, thanks to the learned influences of his family and the teachings of Edgardo Rossaro, his first drawing teacher, he developed an early passion for the arts, particularly painting and engraving.

During her teenage years, she moved to Ferrara with her family, where she was profoundly influenced by the local artistic environment and became acquainted with the principles of the Novecento movement. This path led her, in her early twenties, to her first solo exhibitions, until she was invited to exhibit at the Venice Biennale in 1928, an event in which she participated continuously until 1950.
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In 1929, she married Nello Quilici, journalist and director of the Corriere Padano, with whom she actively collaborated, becoming the coordinator of the Third Page. From their union two sons were born, Folco, who later became a film director, and Vieri, a well-known architect. However, the marriage was tragically interrupted by Nello’s death during the plane crash of 28th June 1940 in Tobruk, in which Italo Balbo, who was driving the aircraft, and for whom Quilici was acting as press officer in Libya, also lost his life.

Widowed, Mimi moved to Rome.

There, his artistic life received a new impetus: he began to devote himself even more intensively to depicting landscapes, coastal in particular, evolving into a more expressive and tormented painting, thanks to the skilful and dialogic use of light and colour, which created highly suggestive results. His referent in painting remained Cézanne, but reinterpreted through Morandi.

It was not until 1958 that his pictorial executions began to subside, coinciding with his return and frequent trips to the Comacchio Valleys, where he began pictorial cycles and works that later flowed into exhibitions and displays between Rome and northern Italy.

Throughout the next three decades he worked tirelessly, earning international awards and recognition.

He died in Rome on June 16, 1990.

Among his best-known works are: the portrait of his grandfather Giovanni Buzzacchi “Il nonno garibaldino” (1961), the fresco “La glorificazione delle sante Felicita e Perpetua” (1940) at the Corradini village in Libya, the exhibitions “Le Valli di Comacchio (Ferrara, 1960), “Paintings of the Tiber” (Rome, 1976), “Mediterranean, Light and Space” (Rome, 1979) to which must be added the curatorship of numerous book and magazine covers and the valuable engravings, and in particular woodcuts, to which he worked steadily from his beginnings.

Many of his works are now kept in the permanent collection at Medole’s “Civica Raccolta d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea,” housed in the Palazzo Ceni building.

You can consult thebirth certificate on the Ancestry Portal: Mantua State Archives, Italian Civil Status (Mantua Court records) from 1901, Medole, 1903

Note in the margin of the deed the clerk’s note marking the marriage to Nello Quilici, February 2, 1929 in Ferrara.

The original is kept in the Court of Mantua.