Historical Background

The “Liceo Artistico D. Colao” is situated in an area that preserves a large testimony of different historical stratifications: the settlements of pre-Hellenic Sicilians, the polis Greek, Roman and Byzantine domination,the Normans, the Angevin and the Aragonese. ​

Since 1500 artists and writers held high the sense of art and culture in Vibo Valentia .There have been many famous men who over the centuries helped to put the city into a place of remarkable activities in every field of thought. ​

The name of our school is in honour of Domenico Colao. Many have been the Calabrian painters that have given a significant contribution to the national art and among the most important Calabrian painters was Domenico Colao. ​

He was born in 1881 in Monteleone now known as Vibo Valentia where he finished high school and only for his father’s will who was a judge, he studied law for two years at the University of Naples.When his father dies, he left his law studies to pursue his true passion and his ideals and enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, From 1908 to 1911 he was in Paris, where he met the most advanced painting and painters of the period Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin.​

He was considered the “poet of the landscape” his works trace the simplicity of nature, the reality of men, the immobility of the rural world, the loneliness.His is definitely an existential attitude that rejects any preconceived artistic theory. That is why we do not find in Colao any shapes or colours typical of the Impressionism.​