MOULIN ROUGE
1999
After my first year at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, my professor Gaetano Castelli — one of Italy's most celebrated set designers — was commissioned to design the scenographies for the Moulin Rouge in Paris. He brought me on as his assistant painter at the Tecnart workshop, where those sets were built and painted by hand.
It was my first real encounter with the craft — large-scale scenic painting, physical and precise. The scenographies designed that season are still on stage at the Moulin Rouge today.