The Name: MISA
A legacy carried in art, not ideology
The name MISA is not a brand.
It is a tribute, to my grandfather, Paolo Galeffi, an artist, educator, and man of contradictions who lived through one of the most fractured chapters of Europe’s history.
We share not only a name, but the same stubborn love for art, structure, and the unfiltered beauty of reality.
The origin of the name
My grandfather lived in a time when history gave no easy choices.
He joined the Fascist Party, not from conviction, but from circumstance.
When Mussolini offered him the position of President of Opera Balilla, the institution responsible for schools, children, and cultural events, he accepted.
It was a role of responsibility more than ideology, a way to build, educate, and sustain.
Later, he was transferred to Pula (then Italian territory, now Croatia) as headmaster of a high school.
When the war ended, and the tide of retaliation rose, he fled on foot with his wife and four children, walking all the way to Milan to survive.
There, he was arrested for his former position, found guilty, and later released.
He rebuilt himself quietly, as a teacher, a painter, and a human being devoted to beauty.
In the years that followed, he created and exhibited under a new name: MISA.
It became his refuge, a signature of rebirth.
Not a name to hide behind, but one to start again with.
Art as redemption
My grandfather spent the rest of his life painting.
He loved colour, form, and the dignity of composition.
He believed that art was not an escape from truth but a way to reconcile with it.
Through brush, shape, and silence, he turned regret into creation and pain into palette.
MISA, for him, was not a disguise.
It was a way to say: I am still here, still learning, still creating.
His home was filled with canvases, sketches, and tools.
Not trophies, but traces of a man who refused to stop making beauty, even after the world had turned against him.
He died as he lived: working, observing, forgiving through art.
The inheritance of meaning
When I became an artist, I chose to carry his name, not to revive the past, but to redeem it.
Our stories echo: the struggle, the rise, the fall, the need to rebuild identity through truth.
Where his medium was paint, mine became light and sound, photography and music.
Different instruments, same intention: to reveal what cannot be said.
We both lived between contradictions:
discipline and sensitivity, structure and rebellion, failure and faith.
We both sought beauty not as perfection, but as a form of moral coherence.
MISA is therefore not a pseudonym, it is a continuum.
It is my grandfather’s unfinished sentence, and my way of completing it.
MISA today
Today, MISA stands for an art that belongs to no ideology, no institution, no market.
It stands for the belief that beauty heals, that creation redeems, and that truth always outlives propaganda.
The name carries both his history and my own, not purified, but accepted.
It reminds me that art is not born from innocence.
It is born from honesty.
“My grandfather taught me that we are not defined by the systems we served,
but by the beauty we dared to create afterward.”
Misa
Epilogue
MISA began as one man’s attempt to reconcile art and conscience.
It continues as another’s attempt to do the same, through the lens instead of the brush.
A name once used to survive has become a name used to tell the truth.
It belongs now to no party, no period, no power,
only to the persistence of creation,
the courage to begin again,
and the freedom to be real.
