The large canvas by the Valsesian painter Pier Celestino Gilardi (1837-1905), known as Il Renaiolo sul Po , was painted in 1892, when it was exhibited in Turin, at the Valentino Castle. In the immediate future, the painting did not meet with great success and in the local press, always generous with information, only a few hints on this great composition and on the novelty of the theme it deals with appeared. The figure of the man in the foreground, who with brutal effort tries to lift the shovel loaded with sand from the waters of the river, is in the background a photograph of Turin in the late nineteenth century, with the clothes hung by the washerwomen along the bank of the Po and the steam tram that crosses the bridge, in the direction of the Gran Madre.