In 1927, a photographer captured the shy, lanky teenage Piero Fornasetti smiling awkwardly at the camera. “No one could see in the photograph of me at age fourteen,” he later observed, “what sort of person I would become.”
Fornasetti’s path seemed set. His father, Pietro, was a businessman and expected his eldest son to study accounting and run the family’s typewriter-import company. But Piero began retreating to his bedroom, decorating the ceilings with trompe l’oeil watercolors—whimsical women flanked by Roman colonnades, hot-air balloons, flying machines.
