When sports publishers Jim O'Leary and Wayne Parrish acquired a quarter of a million photographs that were the archive of SPORT magazine, they also acquired a time machine.

The former newspaper colleagues didn't just acquire a visual history of sporting events from the 1940s to the 1970s. Frozen in time along with the sweating superstars and personalities were bygone days of social history and technology.

The photos in The Italian Stallions, a mix of action shots and studio portraits, are gorgeous, sometimes brutal odes to a beautiful and scary era. Noses are bent like old-country roads. Cheeks are bruised like too-ripe bananas. Gazes are faraway and glazed.

In one of the exhibit's most memorable images, the Italian-American featherweight Willie Pep — born Gugliermo Papaleo — is captured rearranging the face of Sandy Saddler. The focal point of the photo is Saddler's mouth as it makes a visit to the anatomical real estate also occupied by his right ear.

[Carmen] Basilio is in town for The Sport Gallery, which this week unveiled its exhibition The Italian Stallions on Mill St. in the Distillery District. It features some of the 225,000 photos that gallery owners Wayne Parrish and Jim O'Leary purchased from the defunct Sport Magazine.

There's Jake LaMotta taking his dive against Billy Fox. There's LaMotta peering, menacingly, into a camera lens. "There's Willie. He looks just like me," Basilio says. Willie Pep gives the thumbs up. A black, bloody ooze sits where an eye should be. Triumph amid the gore.

Then there is Basilio in 1958, his face upturned into the camera, lips curled in pain, one eye battered shut after losing the welterweight championship by decision in a rematch with Sugar Ray Robinson. "I fought him twice and beat him twice. That's why he wouldn't fight me a third time."