The Mostra della Pittura e del Ritratto nelle valli dell’Adda e del Mera was held in Sondrio in 1938 at Villa Quadrio, and, notwithstanding the time elapsed, remains nowadays an unicum and a milestone in the progress of local art-historical studies. In particular, remarkable was the section dedicated to the portrait: as many as more than 250 were the works of art – of inequal value – portraing local clergy, nobility and upper class, whose twenty reproduced in black and white in the text. It is an important essay of an iconographical production afterward partially dispersed, very interesting not only for the history of the attires of old, but also from the sociological point of view: because in portraits we can recognize not only the phisical rendering of more or less obscure people of past centuries, but also, and mostly, the very portrait that they wished us to receive of them, of their achievements, of their aspirations.