Having grown up in a learned family environment frequented by painters, writers, musicians and intellectuals, Titina Maselli developed an artistic vocation at a young age, encouraged first by her father Ercole, a well-known art critic linked to the Roman School of the 1930s, and then by Toti Scialoja, whom she would marry in 1945. But Maselli soon broke away from both of them, developing her own personal iconography that would never abandon her and which would intentionally keep her outside of any style or artistic movement of the day.
She had no interest in the pomp of imperial and baroque Rome, but in the neighbourhoods destroyed by the bombing, the reconstruction sites, the shiny asphalt of the roads, which she would paint after setting up her easel in the middle of the night. [...] 
