Salvatore Fiume is an artist who all know but few know who he really is. Art aficionados remember his name well, yet the image they have of his research is, very often, partial: it is limited to an epoch, if not to a single subject, of his production. The complexity of his work generally escapes one and all, not being only concentrated on painting, but also extending to sculpture, architecture, stage sets. And it particularly escapes the intensive season of his first maturity when Fiume creates an immovable world of statues and totems: a season, corresponding to the first decade after the war years, which has been called…metaphysical. How could it be that a period which is so replete with evocative charm and not missing any acknowledgements paid to the artist (the approval given by poet critics such as Carrieri and Buzzati; his participation in the Venice Biennial of 1950, due to the support given by Savinio; his friendship with Gio Ponti; his activities as a set designer at La Scala in Milan; the purchase by the MoMA of New York of the Città di statue, or City of Statues, then directed by the legendary Alfred Barr) has been ignored, if not forgotten, so much so that in the understanding also of scholars and experts, Fiume’s paintings are identified with a sensual and soft world of odalisques and women’s houses, not with an enigmatic city of statues and marble? There could be varied reasons, even if we do not wish to call up the arbitrariness of every critical fortune (habent sua fata picturae…) or the occurrence of contingent circumstances. There is one, however, which could not be omitted and which we would like here to demonstrate at least summarily. The panorama of Italian art, in the first two decades after the war, has been much of a battlefield between two trends: a more or less expressionist realism and geometric or informal abstractism. While historiography has taken into account these two alignments, it has underestimated (and often fully forgotten) any experimentation which did not form part of them. Yet also, though made up of a very small quantity, those experiments were still being done, starting from a so called mental figuration, away from realism, naturalism and expressionism, and instead linked with a metaphysical lesson drenched with classical memories (whose fathers, among others, were mostly still alive and functioning in those decades: to take just one example, Donghi was deceased in 1963, Campigli and Usellini in 1971, de Chirico himself in 1978). From this general historiographic prejudice…one should not remove Fiume’s actual metaphysical season. Including the aggravating circumstance that, in his case, one could not fully understand the Sicilian, or rather Arab and Middle Eastern, vitality and sensuality of his painting, unless one takes into account that marble chill of forms and figures making up an ensemble of antithesis and premise. All of Fiume’s paintings move between two opposite polarities: on the one hand, a breaking through and uncontainable physicality, on the other a suspension of time and life. His visions of odalisques and Japanese geishas, of bullfights and dreamlike beasts, cannot be fully understood unless one reflects on the origins of that vitality: the omen of an immovable world, of a people made up of characters who, to use de Chirico’s words, “have divested life’s orgasm” and who they lay out on the canvass like chessmen. “The ability to switch off every glimmer of light, of that flowing and explainable light, in the painted pictures, to dress them all over again with that solemnity and that immobility, with a serene and perturbing countenance, like pictures containing the secrets of sleep and death, is the privilege of great arts”, de Chirico wrote yet again in 1920, in a piece which Fiume probably was not aware of, but which he might have well signed…