"I knocked on the door of this wondrous city". Formative experience and identity xcontruction in Costantino Nivola's American exile

The exile in the US was the crucial experience in Costantino Nivola's life and the basis of his artistic life. This essay recontructs the process of "rewiriting of the self" that, trought the development of a dense network of relationships (from the Italian antifascists to the Sardinian anarchists, from the milieu of the architectural magazinesand to the the modernist émigrés, from the cercle of the New Yorck intellectuals to the artists of the New York School) led Nivola to reinvent himself as a sculptor.