The Nicoli Studio worked for Arturo Martini for many years, and the flat over the workshop and next to the house is still called "Martini's rooms".

The correspondence between Martini and Ruggero Nicoli is kept in the Nicoli archives: 

Under Arturo Martini a group of workers opened to new experiences was created (...) luckily. I had workers who were open to certain experiences, because these works, if compared with traditional techniques, were paradoxes: to say "I shall make one part, finish it up to the point of polishing it, then I shall get a tool which is used for rough-hewing and I shall hit the work on the polished surface as though I were rough-hewing it" was such an absurdity! Or the famous experiments of his, which were such paradoxes, that the workers would say: "The Maestro wants us to knock off that head with a hammer-blow! He must be drunk!" They would rush into my father's office and tell him everything, that perhaps the Maestro had drunk too much: "It will be a good idea if you come and make sure that he is not going out of his head". Then my father would go to the studio, have a long chat with Martini, understand that Martini was going through a very lucid phase of research and order the marble-cutters to knock that head off as requested, not think twice about it. I am obviously talking of the "Woman swimming under water", whose head was severed with one blow by the stone-cutter Conserva, who used a special stone-cutting hammer whose handle was 60 centimeters long and whose head weighed 5 kilos!" 

From "L'Uomo di Marmo" by Giandomenico Semeraro, published by Meiattini, 2000.