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Pierluigi Cappello was a poet from the Friuli-Venezia-Giulia region of Northern Italy. At age sixteen he suffered a tragic motorbike accident, which left him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Cappello became a widely popular poet and the recipient of many awards including the 2010 Viareggio-Repaci prize for poetry for his collection Mandate a dire all’imperatore. In 2013 Rizzoli published his selected poems in the volume Azzurro Elementare. Poesie 1992-2010, and, in 2017, a group of thirty new poems, Stato Di Quiete. English translations of his work have appeared in Poetry, PN Review, AGNI, Asymptote, Narrative Magazine, and several other journals. Much of his work is about his quiet life in Gemona del Friuli and Chiusaforte, two remote and ancient Italian villages in the Alps. Cappello passed away in 2017.

In 2025, KBAC Director Jeff Abshear received a Kalamazoo Artistic Development Grant (KADI) from the Arts Council of Greater Kalamazoo, to work in Italy to print a letterpress edition of La neve che sei stato (The Snow That You Once Were), by Pierluigi Cappello, with translations by the poet, translator, and editor Todd Portnowitz. Jeff worked with the master printer Danielle Facchin at Tipoteca Fondazione Italiana, a renowned typography studio and museum in Cornuda (Treviso), to set the poems in Italian and English and print them on a 19th century Albion iron hand press. While in Italy he visited Chiusaforte, the small town in the Alps on the border between Italy and Austria where Cappello grew up and spent much of his time. He spoke with several people who knew him and took photos and made drawings of the village and surrounding mountains. These became source material for the drypoint etchings included in the book that he printed at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, in Venice. The pages were then shipped to Michigan where they were bound at the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center.

This book was printed in an edition of 30 with a soft folded paper cover.