This intimate sculpture presents a white veined marble slab carved into the form of an open book, its two pages separated by a delicate central spine, upon which rests a polished egg carved from striated onyx. The egg displays a luminous gradation of color, moving from soft celadon green at its center outward through warm bands of amber, rust, and cream, its smooth surface catching light with a quiet radiance that contrasts beautifully against the cooler, more restrained tonality of the marble beneath it. The work is modest in scale yet dense with symbolic resonance, measuring just 15.5 by 21 centimeters, roughly the dimensions of a closed paperback, making it at once a sculptural object and an object that invites handling, contemplation, and proximity. Mirella Bentivoglio (1922 to 2017) was one of the foremost figures in Italian concrete and visual poetry, and throughout her decades-long practice she returned repeatedly to the book as a subject, a form, and a philosophical proposition. For Bentivoglio, the book was never merely a vessel for text but a primary site of meaning in itself, its physical structure inseparable from questions of origin, knowledge, and generation. By replacing written language with a pre-linguistic, primordial form such as the egg, she enacts a kind of reversal, substituting the accumulated signs of human culture with a symbol of pure potential and beginning. The egg rests not inside the book but on top of it, neither contained nor explained by the text beneath, but rather floating above it as something that precedes and perhaps exceeds written knowledge. The choice of onyx is significant, as the stone carries its own internal narrative in the form of geological strata laid down over vast stretches of time, lines that mimic writing without constituting it. Both materials, marble and onyx, are ancient stones with long histories in Mediterranean sculpture and architecture, and their pairing here connects Bentivoglio's conceptual concerns to a broader tradition of craft and material culture. This work belongs to a body of sculptures the artist developed across the 1980s that sit at the intersection of Arte Povera sensibility, feminist inquiry into creative origin, and the traditions of visual poetry, offering collectors a rare object that is at once visually serene and intellectually layered.