In his book about Sicily, Matteo Collura recalls an aristocratic loner, Raniero Alliata di Pietratagliata (1886-1979), to whom the science owes a great collection of butterflies now stored at the Terrasini Museum. The eccentric prince was also a researcher of supernatural phenomena, and the author of trachettili – images formed in trance, with the author's limited control, by spraying pigment through a punched cellophane and grinding it with a waxed stone. Today perhaps we could see in this practice novelty of Dadaism. Painting is sometimes calling up spirits, not only because of illusiveness of presentations. It sometimes involve creation of new shapes from an amorphous chaos by a combination of knowledge and ignorance, awareness and vague intuitions, proficiency and mistakes, clear ideas and unexpected coincidences.