Son of Antonio and Elisa Cadorini, he was born in Trieste on 21 March 1878. He received his first training in the fin-de-siècle intelligentsia of Trieste, especially in the city art circle, where he met Eugenio Scomparini, Arturo Rietti and Guido Grimani. He made a study trip to Munich (perhaps in 1895) which proved decisive for his maturity because it put him in contact with the evolution of the visual arts in Germany: his first posters Fixed the idea, for the Italian ink federation ( 1900), and that for the Lodi Exhibition (1901) were influenced, in the liberty setting of the decoration and in the allegorical nudes, of the ways of Franz Von Stuck, which the D. had the opportunity to meet together with A. Boecklin and the designers of the secessionist magazines Pan, Jugend and Simplicissimus. In 1897 his father sent him to Milan to the Ricordi graphic workshops, where he entrusted him to another illustrious Trieste artist and friend, Leopoldo Metlicovitz. Metlicovitz himself, Aleardo Villa and Alfredo Hohenstein, artistic director of the house, helped D. in the rapid transition from learning chromolithographic techniques to creating posters from his own sketches. In 1898, while continuing to work for Ricordi, Gualapini and for the Modiano and Cantarella companies, the D. opened a studio in Milan. In this environment, which filtered the most up-to-date French, English and German experiences, D. elaborated in just two years, from 1897 to 1899, a very personal, concise and innovative code through which he managed to reconcile traditional painting with the needs of advertising promotion (Curci, 1985, p. 11). In 1899 he was called to Bologna by the publisher Edmondo Chappuis. During this stay, which ended in 1905, D. attracted attention in Italy and abroad with some works that marked his best period: already in 1900 he had won a gold medal at the Universal Exposition in Paris. for a billboard unknown to us; from 1900 to 1902, for three consecutive years, he imposed himself in the Bolognese competitions organized by the Society for the awakening of the city to advertise the "Spring Feasts". He soon revealed his brilliant and worldly personality which allowed him to fit perfectly into the beautiful Bolognese world of his time. In this period he met Elisa Bucchi whom he will marry in 1911 and who will constantly appear in his posters. Also in 1900 he began his activity as an illustrator by designing covers, cartoons, decorated letters for various magazines: La Lettura (monthly of the Corriere della sera; from 1901), Novissima (Milan; 1901), La Week (Naples; 1900), Varietas (Milan; 1904), Ars et labor (Milan; 1906), and in particular L'Italia ride (Bologna; 1900), where the D. revealed "... the Pre-Raphaelite matrix, but also the classical-ancient matrix .. . the same that nourishes the pagan dreams of symbolist classicism of those years ... "(Bossaglia, 1967, p. 38). After a very short stay in Genoa, perhaps a few months, at the Armanino printing house, in 1906 he settled permanently in Milan, where he forged increasingly deep-rooted relationships with the business world. Having achieved a consolidated reputation as a "master" of poster design, in 1906 he returned to work for Giulio Ricordi. His style always followed discreetly the contemporary figurative currents avoiding any direct pictorial commitment, but preferring to mediate and rework them through graphic expression. So in this period two-dimensionality prevailed, wide chromatic drafts, simplified and accentuated shape of the outline on the wave of the influence of the secession and even before that of Japanese graphics. Even the thematic choices, the celebrated "little women" built with a few features, eg. for the Liquore Strega (1906), they referred to P. Bonnard, J. Cheret and H. Toulouse Lautrec. He confirmed his growing fame by winning the first prize for the celebratory poster of the Simplon tunnel (1906) and by realizing the internal decoration of the building of the Italian decorative art section at the International Simplon Exhibition (the external one was made by G. Chini ). Also around 1906 a long collaboration began, which continued until 1914, with the packaging house Mele di Napoli, dealing with the promotion of the company's image. He also created posters for Hellera (at the Regio theater in Turin in 1909) by I. Montemezzi and La secchia rapita by J. Bourgmeine (pseud. By G. Ricordi), staged at the Alfieri theater in Turin in 1910. In 1911 he won the competition for advertising of the Borsalino company; in the same year he was called by the publisher Albert Langen of Munich to replace Ferdinand von Reznicek, owner of the worldly page of the satirical magazine Simplicissimus, a collaboration that he had again after 1918 and then after 1945 (L. Borgese, in Opere di M. D., 1968, pp. N.n.). As illustrator he was special correspondent of the magazine in Ostend, Dauville, Paris, London, Montecarlo and created extraordinary environmental paintings and portraits of fashionable characters which were collected by Langen himself in an album published in Monaco in 1913 entitled Corso. The only daughter Adriana was born in Munich. With the great war the work of D. underwent a profound crisis; in 1914 he returned to Milan where, suspected of pro-Germanism, supervised and exempt from military service, he resumed working for Ricordi with whom he had never interrupted his collaboration. But the rapid transformation of society found him unable to interpret events with the same incisiveness as before. Instead, he improved the organization of his work and increased the commissions as the times of post-war industrial reorganization increasingly required. Between 1917 and 1919 he was in Turin where he worked for the publisher Polenghi and approached the cinema, coming into contact with much faster methods of execution and more direct forms of communication. He then met the French poster designer L.-A. Mauzan, from which he learned the essentiality of messages, chromatic contrasts, new lexical elements, such as shading, aimed at a different plasticity, while the highlighting of a single character and the monochromatic background derived from Leonetto Cappiello from Livorno. Around 1920 he founded in Milan with Arnaldo Steffenini the Star, an advertising production company, which entrusted the printing and dissemination of his posters and those of other artists to IGAP (General poster and advertising company) of which D. himself was the artistic director from 1922 to 1936 (Annitrenta, 1983, p. 552). Carpano, Pirelli, Strega, Assicurazioni Generali, La Rinascente are among the increasingly numerous and important clients of the D. With this last firm the D. established a privileged and continuous relationship (1921-1956), creating more than fifty posters. Around 1920 he also resumed making covers and illustrations for magazines (Il Travaso delle Idee, ed. In Rome, and Rapiditas, the motoring magazine published in Rome by Novissima), as well as postcards and drawings for calendars. He participated in the twelfth and thirteenth Venice Biennale respectively in 1920 and 1922. In the twenties and thirties, while artists such as F. Depero, Seneca, M. Sironi, Seco (S. Pozzati) were establishing more cultured and committed lines of research , began the slow decline of the D. that continued in its production by now in the manner. In 1931-32 he painted frescoes for the canteen of the Rome Air Force ministry. In 1935 and 1938 he collaborated with INA (National Insurance Institute) for the creation of the covers of the illustrative brochures of the rural policy and of the XXI Aprile one (I seventy-five years of INA, Rome 1987, pp. 63 ff.) . Between 1936 and 1937 he was called to Libya by Italo Balbo as a decorator and returned there again in 1951 when the Circolo degli Italiani remained in Libya organized an exhibition on him (Curci, 1976, pp. 35, 74 ff.) . The D. exhibited tempera, drawings and sketches in numerous solo exhibitions starting from 1942 (ibid., P. 81). In 1945 his wife Elisa died. The D. died in Milan on March 31, 1962.