"Invitation to the coup", completed in 1981, is probably one of Wolfgang Lettl's most confusing paintings.

Everything becomes even more surreal by reading the newspaper article with surrealistic hues that Dr. Giacomino Vascello, inspired by the painting, reported to an Italian newspaper. Below is a brief summary of the article:

"INCREDIBLE: A foggiano made his contribution to the fall of the Berlin wall.

Dr. Vascello from Foggia and Wolfgang Lettl, Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, have been good friends for many years, they meet in front of wine, good food and classical music to talk about the world of art, law and ethics. Wolfgang Lettl used the figure of Dr. Vascello for his painting "Invitation to the coup".

A few years pass and something extraordinary happens: in Germany, where election campaigns are much more based on posters and postcards than in Italy, an inexplicable whim of fate makes this painting chosen for the Campaign for the unification of the two Germanys. .

Since then, all the walls of Germany have been covered with this image, and hundreds of millions of postcard reproductions pass through the hands of millions of Germans. Both by joke and by coincidence, Dr. Vascello thus became the symbol of the spirit of the German nation.

All this was undoubtedly born between a glass of wine, Mozart's music and a bowl of steaming spaghetti but above all, of course, during discussions on the ethics of the state.

With his artist's eyes, the German painter saw the true spirit of the state in the obscure official of Southern Italy and wanted to pass on the fruit of his discovery to his compatriots and descendants.

And so a Foggia artist has become an indelible part of one of the most dramatic moments in recent history.