The award is dedicated to the entrepreneur and clay bas-relief sculptor from Viterbo Enrico Zarletti (March 4, 1902 - August 24, 1981).

 

He is the only one among his brothers following his father's profession, beginning as a master mason, then improving as a building contractor. The wages of a simple worker that the father gives him is not enough to maintain his family of 6 children. He’s therefore forced to create his own business in the footsteps of the parent.

 

Enrico's life is, from this moment on, completely dedicated to his work and his family. Working on the construction site from which he never escapes, even if being the chief of his society. The stories about him portray him, stoically, in the effort of manual labor, to the point that the traumas he occasionally suffers on the construction site, although involving bone fractures too, cannot keep him in bed, bandaged by his wife, for more than two days. He never attended artistic or academic studies.

 

Art in him is an instinctive and natural passion that blooms only in the last part of his life, when, after witnessing the birth of fifteen grandchildren, he falls ill with stomach cancer. He was cured on in Genoa but he was later diagnosed with leukemia. During the battle against incurable evil illness, almost in unexpected support, his artistic practice with clay was born, encouraged by Nara, his daughter and sculptor, who, in Genoa, assists him in his struggling illness. Enrico, learn from her to treat clay and shape it according to what is a more natural than academic talent. He has no notions of perspective drawing, and his drawings are made "by hand" with a ruler and are, more often than not, inaccurate. From them as from his numerous creations (he made one a day in the years of his illness) a strength and a love for the work of his hands is cleary evident, which belongs exclusively to the most sensitive artistic soul. His history testifies how art can be a symbol of life, a tool to obtain memory and man's last desperate defense against an incurable disease.