Havana

In 1948, when Italy was still wretched from the aftermath of the war, Havana was booming. Wartime profits from the sugar and shipping industries were being poured into new construction, both commercial and residential. The Cuban government was stable and on good terms with its big neighbor to the north. Havana's nightclubs, casinos, and ladies of the evening pulled in free-spending North Americans, hose dollars further primed the economy.

For Miguel and Francisco Gallo, Enzo's uncles and owners of the Gallo y Hermanos marble works in the Marianao section of Havana, the Cuban surge of prosperity meant orders for busts and bas-reliefs, basins and balusters, columns and cartouches. With one of Miguel's sons still in school and another in Italy, the Gallos were delighted to be getting an experienced helper.

The principal project of Gallo y Hermanos at the moment was decorative work on the Capitol building, and Enzo soon found himself on the job with mallet, chisels, and pneumatic hammer.

Enzo had learned about marble in Italy, but he learned marble crafting in Havana the hard way: handling, cutting, tapping, chipping, hammering, chiseling, shaping, polishing. Every day his hands grew more certain.

Much of Enzo's work was placed in the Colon Cemetery, reputedly second only to one in Genoa in the grandeur of its monuments and decoration. Mingled with the columned and frescoed mausoleums was a host of marble statuary, and in statuary Enzo excelled. His hands and eyes had memorized the classical poses so well that sometimes he set to work on the raw marble without even a sketch for guidance; his disciplined hands transcribed perfectly the forms etched in his memory.

In addition to its commercial clientele, the Gallo marble studio also served as a center of sorts for Havana's sculptors who would drop by to select marble for their works. One of them, Juan Jose Sicre, who also was a profesor of fine art at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro, the Ecole des Beaux Arts of Cuba, voiced his appreciation of the work of the fledgling sculptor. The conversation changed Enzo's life.

"Professor Sicre invited me to audit his classes at San Alejandro. In April, May, and June of 1948 I spent all my evenings and weekends there. We studied sketching, starting with still-lifes and going on into draped and nude figures; we did a lot of work in proportion; and we had an introduction to art history. In June, when the classes ended, the professor had a long talk with me.

"'You have a way with marble that few artists ever achieve; he told me. 'But you need more formal training in art to become a really fine sculptor:"

So in October of 1948 Enzo Gallo, marble craftsman, enrolled in San Alejandro Academy, whose classes were to transform him into a professional sculptor and professor of fine art. But the transformation didn't happen overnight.

For seven years Enzo worked at the Gallo marble studio until four every afternoon, then rushed to the academy to attend classes until ten PM. Once returned home, he would study past midnight. He studied with such maestros of the Cuban art community as Sicre, credited by the Enciclopediad e Cuba as the father of that country's modern sculpture movement; with Leopoldo Romanach, whose redoubtable influence on Cuban painting extended well back into the nineteenth century; and with Mario Santi, a founder of both the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro and the Escuela Provincial de Artes Plasticas de Oriente, another highly considered Cuban art institution.

One summer during his six years as an undergraduate at San Alejandro, Enzo set out on a holiday to Mexico. He had an opportunity to watch Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Sigueiros at work on their murals. The influences he felt during that month seared themselves on the artistic style of the young sculptor.

During those same years, Enzo was raising the level of craftsmanship in his marble sculpting. He could laugh now at his first marble busts, done in Padula under the eyes of his father. "Those first pieces were of King Vittorio Emmanuele III and of Mussolini;' he says. "In those days you had to do both, otherwise you were in trouble with one side of the government or the other:'

It was during those first few years in Havana that Enzo finally reached an understanding with his father, who still clung to his dream that Enzo should become an engineer.

With four of his children in far-off Havana, and one of them showing signs of becoming an artist, Bruno Gallo decided to go to Havana to see just what those Gallo youngsters were up to.

Enzo, he discovered, was up to his ears in work. He had become a fine craftsman in decorative marble, and his intense study at the San Alejandro academy had gone a long way towards polishing the rough edges in his background. In addition, Enzo had a charming young girlfriend from a fine Cuban family.

Bruno Gallo looked at Enzos marble work on the Havana Capitol and in Colon Cemetery. He visited the academy and talked to several of Enzds professors. Then he met Carmen Garcia and her parents. He was impressed with Enzos work, and pleased with the reports of his studies.

"I remember I was making same plaster casts at the time, and when they would turn out a little weak in places, I would lose my temper and break them;' Enzo says. "My father talked to me about it. 'Enzo, you are doing well. But you need patience. Just as marble was not formed in a single day, to become a master sculptor is a slow process, a process that must be followed step by step, to the end of the journey.

Years later, when he talked about that memorable visit by his father, Enzo recalled his lack of interest when the three elder Gallo brothers, Bruno, Miguel, and Francisco and their brother-in-law, Antonio Gallo, discussed the Cuban government, comparing it with the Government they had seen come and go in Italy. Since the days of his first busts, Enzo had paid little attention to politics, and he never expected the Cuban regime to trouble itself with him, a marble sculptor. The military coup that brought Fulgencio Batista into power in March of 1952 had not affected anyone that Enzo knew, and business remained bustling. Someday he would marry Carmen Garcia, open his own marble studio where he could do fine art work, and they would raise a family in Havana.

On October 30, 1955, Enzo Gallo graduated from the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro with a master's degree in fine art.

"What I wanted most of all was the practical experience of working with master sculptors. And I knew the one place in all the world where I had to go to get it.I was going to take the same road that Michelangelo took. To Carrara:'