This painting depicts a series of ancient and imaginative architectures observable from the shadow of a majestic portico, allowing us to hypothesize as the subject of the painting the sublimated and syncretic rendering of the external part of a gymnasium with a courtyard / gym on the right, or of a simple square town.Alessandro Sanquirico (1777-1849) was a Milanese set designer and painter. The prolific study at the workshop of Paolo Landriani allowed the artist to specialize in the material but also pictorial set-up of real antique sets, such as the erudite glimpse of a Greek polis offered in the following painting, also according to the antiquarian taste promoted at the time by Giovanni Battista Piranesi