Verdiano Marzi was born in 1949 in Ravenna. A primary school teacher, noting his predisposition for natural sciences and drawing, encouraged his parents to enroll him at the State Institute of Mosaic Art. Six intense years of learning followed by the Ravenna mosaic masters: Sergio Cicognani, Giuseppe Ventura, Ines Morigi Berti and Antonio Rocchi. Thus, from the age of eleven, his tiles will never abandon him in order to create the mosaic of his life.  

From the teacher to the masters: essential are the encounters with the sculptor Giò Pomodoro, poet of form and lover of matter and with the mosaicist Renato Signorini, meditative, with controlled gestures.

Settled in France since 1973, he met Riccardo Licata, mosaic teacher in Paris, with whom he shared an insatiable curiosity.

In France he ran mosaic public commissions (in an automatic metro station in Lille, at the Bourgoin-Jallieu Technical Institute in Isère and at the Villars Middle School in Denain). Among the many exhibitions, we remember his first solo show organized at the Venice Biennale in 1986 - he will return over there in the San Marino Pavilion during the Biennale in 2011 - and in Ravenna during RavennaMosaico 2013. In 2011 he participated in the Fourth Moscow Biennale, in the section Special projects with a Russian architect and, in 2014, the 1965-2014 Retrospective presented his works at the Museum of the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg.

A shrewd and passionate teacher, he taught for thirty-seven years in the mosaic laboratory of the Municipality of Bagnolet, in the Parisian suburbs where he resides, and for twenty years in that of the Louvre museum he created in 1994. He has traveled the world to teach mosaic, from Dharamsala in India with Tibetan children in exile, to Moscow, to Bastelica in Corsica. He is a caring teacher and a valued advisor to the Maison de la Mosaïque Contemporaine in Paray-le-Monial in Burgundy, the Hamada children's art museum in Japan and the Chicago Mosaic School.