Twelve artists chosen from those who have marked an epoch. Twelve ways of doing painting, adopting languages that range from actual painting to video, freely reconstruct a new and unexpected genealogy of the different trends in Italian art during the last forty years. Apart from reproductions of a selection of the major works by the artist (Burri, Lo Savio, Griffa, Boetti, Mario Merz, Anselmo, Vettor Pisani, Clemente, De Maria, Arienti, Marisaldi, Toderi), the book also contains a brief text by each of them - almost a page stolen from a diary - which reveals little-known aspects of their thought and provides the curious reader with a confidential thread, which leads him to discover the contemporary Italian art world from the Sixties to the present.