Stefano Minutella was born in 1994 in Petralia Sottana and grew up and was educated in the Alte Madonie area. After completing his classical studies in 2014, he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo, where he obtained a first and second level diploma in Graphic Art, furthering his studies in experimental techniques. In 2020, he moved to Florence to take courses in chalcography at the Fondazione il Bisonte and participated in several exhibitions throughout Italy. The following year, in Ravenna, he won first prize at the “Premio di Incisione Ilaria Ciardi 2021” and in 2022 he joined the “Associazione Nazionale Incisori Contemporanei” (National Association of Contemporary Engravers). In October 2023, he collaborated with the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica in Rome on a project to restore, conserve and enhance the antique copperplates in the prestigious Calcoteca. In 2025, he was once again a guest at the Fondazione il Bisonte for an Artist Residency. He is currently engaged in a PhD project at the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo and actively pursues his artistic research in his studio.
 
The work is strongly inspired by mountain locations, moving between familiar and mysterious spaces, welcoming and dark. An impression that becomes a story, a story told through images, made up of marks engraved on metal. A mountain, a generative force in its unstoppable becoming, emerges as an icon of grandeur and solemnity. Family memories of an ancient Sicily, a rural countryside, steeped in slow gestures, still devoted to grazing and agriculture. From the wildest peaks to the cultivated hills, agricultural activities and livestock farming mark the territory, leaving their mark on the geological fabric with mule tracks and trails, ancient watering holes and old farmhouses, often abandoned. When the straight roads give way to hairpin bends, the economy of our ancestors emerges, a continuous transhumance from the town to the market, from the sheepfold to the hearth. These works were created among the paths of the Alte Madonie, long horse rides in search of a return to the origins and places that once characterised the daily life of our grandparents. With the advent of modernity, we descended to the plains, depopulating the mountains and forgetting their stories. A photographic investigation that moves around these places, now part of a past that is perhaps too distant. A psychological and spiritual journey that transforms into a deeply engraved mark.