During Giuseppe’s second year of life they move to Rome and then to Verona, before moving in 1930 at the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua, in which the family will be hosted for the next nine years.

The year 1939 sees the turn of the Galleria Estense in Modena, where Carmelo Gambino has been invited to work, and where the family will stay until 1943.

It’s 1944 and, in the midst of WW2, the Gambino move to Guiglia, in the Appennines. Once again their residence correspond to the place in which Giuseppe’s father works: Castello Monrecucoli, in which Carmelo works along with Pietro Zamperci, supervisor for the artistic heritage of the storage set-up for the works of art evacuated from Emilia and Piemonte in order to preserve them from bombardment.

This is the period in which Giuseppe commence to draw and paint, as Pietro Zampetti attests: “his father, unbeknown to Giuseppe, every so often, showed me that papers: created without complacency, they appeared as a direct message of a consciousness discovering the world, and feeling it as a true one, well beyond the hell in which he found himself. It seems to me an incredible thing how, without any kind of Master, he could express himself with such confidence and communication skills”.

In the meantime the area had become the scene of bloody conflicts between partisans and German troops. The latter sent Gambino to a camp work in which he was constricted to pick up the corpses and wash the one by one to then recollect them into the coffins.

Young Pino’s psyche and body commence now to become more and more weaken that he has to be ricovered in a sanatorium. This forced recovery will bring him to often covertly escape from the hospital and to go the rare dance hall of the time, where he could find inspirations for his drawings, always done in a second moment.

Until 1950, five years after the end of the war, Giuseppe will move from a sanatorium to another, among which we remember that of Gaiato and Pavullo nel Frignano.