The Piccirilli Factor to Screen at Villa Rinchiostra in Tuscany
- May 12
- 3 min read
Montes-Bradley's documentary on the Italian-American sculptors returns to the marble country that produced them.
Massa, Italy — Tuesday, August 4, 2026 — The gardens of Villa Rinchiostra will host the Italian screening of The Piccirilli Factor, the documentary by Eduardo Montes-Bradley on the six brothers from Massa whose Carrara-marble carvings shaped the civic face of the twentieth-century United States. The screening is presented in partnership with Associazione Italia Nostra.
Director Eduardo Montes-Bradley will introduce the film in person, and will take part in a public conversation with a local art expert following the screening.
The Piccirilli Factor recovers the story of Giuseppe Piccirilli and his sons — Ferruccio, Attilio, Furio, Masaniello, Orazio, and Getulio — who left Massa in the late nineteenth century and established in the Bronx the most important architectural sculpture studio of their era. From that studio came the marble of the Lincoln Memorial, the lions of the New York Public Library, the pediment of the New York Stock Exchange, the figures of the Brooklyn Museum, the Maine Memorial at Columbus Circle, and a substantial part of the marble sculpture that defines Washington, New York, and the civic landscape of the American Republic between the 1890s and the Second World War.
The film makes the case that the brothers, virtually erased from the official narrative of American art history, were among the indispensable hands behind the visible face of the period. The Piccirilli Factor returns them, in this screening, to the Apuan Alps from which their marble was cut and to the town from which they sailed.
The choice of venue is itself part of the gesture. Villa Rinchiostra was conceived in the seventeenth century by Teresa Pamphili — arrived in Massa from Rome as the bride of Duke Carlo II Cybo Malaspina — who in 1675 commissioned its transformation from a hunting lodge into a villa. The court architect Alessandro Bergamini, working in the same architectural language he had already deployed at the Palazzo Ducale of Massa, designed not a palace of state but a private retreat, signaled by the building's unusual choice of two principal façades. Around it rose a garden of boxwood parterres, citrus, lemon and bitter-orange groves, and marble statuary, later enriched by Teresa's son Alderano I and his wife Ricciarda Gonzaga with geometric avenues, vases, busts, and a grand central basin. The dismantling of the marbles began as early as 1722, and the Napoleonic occupation of Massa nearly stripped the gardens entirely. The villa today is the seat of the Museo Guadagnucci, dedicated to the Massese sculptor Gigi Guadagnucci (1915–2013), who, like the Piccirillis a generation before him, gave his life to the marble of these mountains. That a film about the Piccirilli brothers — whose lives were given over to the carving and protection of marble figures — should be screened in the gardens of a villa once nearly emptied of its own marbles, and now home to the work of another Massese marble carver, is a coincidence the director and the organizers have not failed to notice.
The screening at Villa Rinchiostra is open to the public. A reception and a conversation with the director will follow.
Event details
Date: Tuesday, August 4, 2026
Location: Gardens of Villa Rinchiostra, Massa, Italy — a seventeenth-century Cybo-Malaspina residence designed by Alessandro Bergamini for Teresa Pamphili
Presented by: Associazione Italia Nostra
Format: Screening, director's introduction, post-screening conversation with a local art expert
About the director
Eduardo Montes-Bradley is a documentary filmmaker, writer, and the founder of Heritage Film Project. Over more than three decades he has produced films on figures from Borges to Daniel Chester French, Julian Bond, Rita Dove, and George Frederick Bristow. His films are fiscally sponsored through the Documentary Film Fund, a U.S. 501(c)(3), and distributed internationally through Alexander Street Press and Kanopy.
About Heritage Film Project
Heritage Film Project is a documentary production initiative dedicated to recovering the work of cultural figures whose contributions have been obscured by time or institutional forgetting. Its films are non-commercial and are made available to libraries, universities, and the general public.
About Associazione Italia Nostra
Italia Nostra is one of Italy's principal non-profit cultural-heritage organizations, founded in 1955 to defend the artistic, historic, and natural patrimony of the country.
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