Peter Lanyon made this drawing in Italy in the summer of 1950. At the time, he was in the middle of painting Porthleven (1950-51; coll. Tate, London), his first masterpiece of the early 1950s, and in the midst of a huge row with Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth over the heavy-handed imposition of a rule that favoured abstract art at the Penwith Society of Arts. The latter had driven him out of St Ives for a much-needed holiday in the country he considered his second home.

For much of the war Lanyon had been based in southern Italy, where he had learned to speak rudimentary Italian and come to love the culture of the country. On his trip in 1950 he visited Tuscany, Umbria and Venice, and visited many of the principal sites of early Renaissance art and architecture. He later lived in a remote hill town near Rome during the winter of 1953 and was back there again in 1957. On each occasion he made paintings and drawings, of which he made the most of the former when he was back in St Ives and all of the latter in situ. He normally used conté for the drawing, but with this unusually large and colourful work he did something else. Adapting the scrape and scratch method he employed for his paintings of the late 1940s, he laid down a wax ground and then scraped it back to create the buildings and landscape beyond.

Lanyon was vehemently opposed to the neat division of art into abstraction and figuration, and nothing infuriated him more than being classed as an abstract artist. And with good reason. Like some other artists of the period, he married the expressive power of abstract painting with elements of landscape. As part of this process, he often repeatedly drew places in radically different artistic idioms, as he did in this case when he made another much more schematic and less colourful wax drawing of Perugia.