In 1983 Pecoraro went to Pietrasanta, in Tuscany, Italy, and his work changed completely. What caught him was not the finished sculpture but the yards — marble cut, broken, and stacked, arranged by nothing more than convenience. Marble proved far too heavy for small wall pieces, so the first works were built in Plexiglas and painted to imitate stone; within a year he was working in the real material, along with travertine, bronze, and a cast stone of his own recipe oxidized under a propane torch.

The scale grew accordingly, through major commissions for Hughes Aircraft, IBM, and Saks Fifth Avenue, and into monumental work: “Omaggio a Tempo” in Sunnyvale, sixty feet across, and “Campobello di Mazara,” named for the Sicilian town his family came from. By the decade’s end he had moved to Santa Cruz, to an Arabian Horse property and barn (to be converted into a studio) of nearly ten thousand square feet.