Arnaldo Fazzi was born in Lucca in 1855. The son of a watchmaker, he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in his hometown. At 22, he moved to Florence to further his studies with the Sienese sculptor Giovanni Dupré. In 1881, he debuted with a marble statuette, The Falconer, at the Paris Salon; it was the beginning of a distinguished career, studded with public commissions, such as the statue dedicated to Garibaldi for a square in Città di Castello in 1888. The following year, he entered a competition to design the monument to Ugo Foscolo for the Church of Santa Croce in Florence, winning jointly with other artists. Despite praise from critic Diego Martelli, the commission did not select his design for the work. In 1891, he began teaching at the Professional School of Decorative and Industrial Arts in Florence. Two years later, the city of his hometown commissioned a bronze statue commemorating Matteo Civitali, a celebrated 15th-century sculptor from Lucca. The statue still stands under the porticoes of Palazzo Pretorio. In 1895, he entered and won the national competition for the funerary monument of Paduan entrepreneur Antonio Pedrocchi, and the following year he exhibited his design for a decorated concrete fountain at the Exposition of Fine Arts in Florence. In 1900, Fazzi was appointed professor of sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Lucca, where he trained as a young man. Three years later, the city's institutions commissioned the sculptor to create a bronze medallion depicting King Umberto I for the atrium of the town hall. In 1904, he completed a marble bas-relief in the apse of the family chapel of the Marquis Sardini in the Lucca cemetery and was a member of the provincial committee for the 1906 Milan Exposition. Further public recognition came following the national competition for one of the reliefs depicting Fame in the left propylaea of ​​the Vittoriano in Rome. In 1910, he also participated in the competition announced by the Municipality of Genoa for a Monument to the Thousand to be erected on the Quarto rock, winning the cash prize. Over the next three years, he was remembered as a member of the Artistic Council of the Association of Italian Artists of Palazzo Strozzi in Florence and at the 8th edition of the Exposition organized by the association, where he presented the bronze sculpture The Angels of Sin. After more than three decades of teaching, Fazzi retired to Florence, where he died in 1944.