Her work resonated with art lovers and commentators during the first and middle parts of the twentieth century, through which she lived, surviving to a good age.
[4] Leonetta was nine when a court confiscated most of her father's assets in order to compensate shareholders who had lost money by investing in a local bank that he had founded.
[6] She was still living with her family when they moved again, this time leaving Tuscany completely and settling at Colmurano, a small medieval hill town located a short distance inland from Ancona, in Marche.
[1][7] She returned to Tuscany in 1902, aged 20, and enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, where she was taught painting by Giovanni Fattori and "decoration" by Augusto Bruchi.
[7][8] Student contemporaries who became friends included Fillide Levasti, Tommaso Cascella Armando Spadini and his future wife, the beautiful Pasqualina Cervone.
Both were enthusiastic letter writers: thick files of their correspondence survive in accessible archives, to the delight of art history students and scholars of that period.
Directly after the wedding the couple had moved into their new home, a studio apartment at Via Nomentana 331, in a fashionable district at what was then the north-eastern edge of Rome.
Frequent visitors identified by Leonetta herself in her later writings include Armando and Pasqualina Spadini (who had also made the move to Rome), Antonio Baldini, Alfredo Gargiulo, Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, Fausto Torrefranca, Giovanni Amendola, Sibilla Aleramo, Vincenzo Cardarelli, Goffredo Bellonci and Cesare Pascarella, as well as Olga Resnevič and her physician husband, Angelo Signorelli (1878–1952).
It seems also to have been at around the same time that Leonetta began to keep a diary, which she would faithfully maintain for the rest of her life, and which would provide material for books which she would publish half a lifetime later.
[1] During 1915, after many months of secret negotiations with governments in Berlin, London and Paris and much political division at home, Italy joined the belligerents in World War I, persuaded to fight alongside the British by promises of post-war territorial rewards.
Sent to join the fighting on the northern front, he combined his military duties with a distinguished role as a war correspondent for La Tribuna.
[1][7] In 1918, as the war drew to a close, three of her portraits and a landscape were included in the "Young Artists' Exhibition" ("Mostra d’arte giovanile") organised by Carlo Tridenti and Marcello Piacentini at the Casina de Pincio in Rome.
Later that year Emilio Cecchi was offered and accepted a journalism assignment by the "Italian foreign action Bureau" which meant a lengthy stay in England for him, while Leonetta remained in Florence with the children - of whom there were by this time three.
On account of a desperate shortage of suitable housing in the capital, during 1920 they set up their family home, temporarily, at Ariccia, in the hills to the east of Rome, however.
The exhibition featuring approximately 50 oil paintings and watercolours, was a critical success, receiving another enthusiastic review from Oppo in L'Idea Nazionale.
The second of these included two of Pieraccini's "oval portraits" of women, featuring Andriulli Peruzzi and Rosina Pisaneschi, the wife of the writer-commentator Alberto Spaini.
Their fifth floor apartment along the Corso d'Italia enjoyed a fine view over the Villa Borghese: it quickly became a meeting place for members of Rome's literary (and artistic) community, and on occasion a source of help and support for friends who found themselves in need.
[2] Despite its central location, there was space in the substantial apartment for an "Open Sunday" to be held each week for members of the Cecchis' social circle who lived in Rome or who found themselves visiting the capital.
[1][10] Younger recruits included Nino Rota, Leo Longanesi, Vitaliano Brancati, Mino Maccari and Elsa Morante.
[1] Many of the regulars became portrait subjects for Leonetta, including Cesare Pascarella, Massimo Bontempelli, Mario Praz, Riccardo Bacchelli, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Vincenzo Cardarelli, Alberto Moravia, Roberto Longhi and Anna Banti.
[1] The other nine artists whose works featured alongside Pieraccioni's own were Bartoli, Ceracchini, Francalancia, Guidi, Socrate, Trombadori, Trifoglio, Romanelli and Torresini.
It was, in essence, a membership list of Rome's modern art establishment during the Interwar period, and Leonetta Cecchi Pieraccini was most definitely part of it.
With her friends, the polyglot journalist-scholar Henry Furst and the writer-filmmaker Mario Soldati she undertook an intense programme of visits to the city's museums and studies of its vistas.
Pieraccini portraits featured included those of Antonio Baldini, Pietro Aschieri, Sibilla Aleramo, Alberto Moravia, Carlo Visconti Venosta, Henry Furst, Libero de Libero, Enrico Falqui, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Achille Campanile, Amerigo Bartoli, Roberto Longhi, Arnaldo Frateili, Pietro Pancrazi, Gisberto Ceracchini, Ilo Nuñes, Diomira Jacobini, Sonia di Nuccio and Eugenio Giovannetti.
She worked as a journalist with several periodicals and newspapers, especially after the fall of fascism, including Omnibus, launched by Leo Longanesi in 1937, Oggi, L'Europeo and Il Gazzettino.
[1] Leonetta Cecchi Pieraccini's exceptional and acute powers of observation with regard to the world around her was put to good use in her written work just as it had been in her paintings.
There is, in addition, a typescript of the entire set, transcribed by the diarist's younger daughter held in Rome by the Archivio Leonetta Cecchi Pieraccini.
[1] In November 1972 Dario Cecchi, an artistic polymath who is also a painter, arranged what was intended as his mother's final exhibition, which was held in the Galleria Aldina in Rome.