After world war two, Rome lured several American artists whose work became more abstract as they assimilated into the city’s creative community. Piero Dorazio, the internationally-minded Italian artist, recalled that “Americans were no longer going to Paris – that had been in the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1950s, Rome was full of artists.” 

The image of Rome as a “second Paris” and an important catalyst for a postwar avant-garde was broadcast in 1952 by an article in Life, “Americans in Italy,” which declared that “artists from all over the US have swarmed the hillsides and made Rome the rival of Paris as art headquarters.”