A construction site turned into a forest of raw timber: scaffolding towers lean against each other at every angle, cofferdams block off the riverbed in sections, and in the foreground a small industrial locomotive hauls two wagons across a trestle bridge built only to last the length of the works.
The print is almost entirely line: dense hatching for the wet wood and the churned ground, a few patches left untouched to stand for sky and reflected light. Nothing in the scene is dressed for a photograph — no finished structure, no ceremony — only the scaffolding, the cranes, and the workers’ rail line that made the dam possible before it existed as a dam.
The collector’s title for the print is «La diga di S. Chiara d’Ula» — the Santa Chiara dam on the Ula stretch of the Tirso river in Sardinia, which today forms Lago Omodeo — dated 1933. The dam is real and well documented, but the date does not fit it: public records place its construction between 1917/18 and 1923, with the inauguration, by Victor Emanuele III, on 28 April 1924. By 1933 the dam had been complete and in operation for nine years. Either this print documents an earlier stage of the same works and has been mis-dated along the way, or it records construction on a different site entirely; nothing in the image itself settles the question. We keep the collector’s title because it is the only identification we have, and flag the discrepancy rather than smooth it over.
The artist named for the print, Giulio Cisari, was a real printmaker: born in Como on 7 May 1892, trained at Brera, author of a 1926 manual on woodcut technique (La xilografia, Hoepli) and a prolific book-cover designer, he exhibited at the Venice Biennale and the Rome Quadriennale through the 1920s and 30s. Industrial construction was a subject he returned to elsewhere in his career — a print of the Chiavari shipyards dates from as early as 1912 — which makes the attribution plausible on stylistic grounds even where this specific print has no catalogue record of its own. His date of death is itself disputed between sources: the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani gives 28 March 1972, while other reference sites give the same day and month in 1979.
About this image. The work is still protected by copyright: under Italian law (L. 633/1941) rights run for 70 years from the death of the author, and on either recorded date of death that term has not expired. It is reproduced here for documentation, study and critical purposes only, under Art. 70 of L. 633/1941 and the fair-use provision of 17 U.S.C. §107. The scan was made by the collector from his own copy of the work — part of the period material he keeps in a private archive: owning the physical sheet is not the same as holding the rights to the work. The image is not offered for sale, no reproduction rights are granted, and any request concerning the work should be addressed to the rights holders. Cultural Heritage Online publishes this material to document it, with no celebratory intent; see our terms and the DMCA contact published there.
