Furio Santini (Cortona, 1918 - Milan, 2004), known as Sanfurio, spent his youth in Florence and in 1947 he moved to America, working in various cities, including New York and Buenos Aires. Back in Europe, he studied painting first in Paris, where he went assiduously between 1951 and 1958, then in Milan, where he attended the Brera Academy and participated in group exhibitions organized by the Permanent Society. Painter and writer. Restless and shy man. In the course of his life he has made paintings that are very different from each other, in subject and technique. In all, however, it is possible to identify some of his characteristic traits: a certain "naïveté", understood as virginity of the vision of the world, an inclination to figure, also present in apparently non-figurative works and a restlessness, which has never made him feel satisfied with the results achieved, pushing him not to fossilize within certain patterns. His works, through sound and clear colors, speak a simple and clear language. At the beginning of his career, after the academic period, he went through an experimental moment tending towards abstraction, creating paintings in which the tangle of the chromatic fabric sometimes suggests the memory of natural forms. In some cases these works are signed on the two opposite sides, so that by turning them they offer a different point of view to the observer. The need for order and narration, felt strongly in itself, then brought it back into the context of figuring. From 1958 in his works dark registers are contrasted with light notes and the forms become synthetic and geometrizing. In 1960 another turning point: the color becomes more lively and is distributed in horizontal stripes, rendered with a rather pasty but at the same time meticulous brushstroke. Although in the paintings of this period there is a studied aerial perspective, a "naïve" air is perceived and the same can be said for the following ones, where the female figure is often represented. Starting in 1964, the shades of the palette lightened and still lifes appeared immersed in lush and fantastic landscapes, an expression of his moods. Not only a painter, he made his debut as a writer with a single act at a very young age at the Piccolo Teatro in Florence and then collaborated with various newspapers in Italy and abroad. In Milan he published, for Colibrì editions, the novels Il tempo di Lapo (1994), Uno mista del CASO (1995) and Il viaggio continues (1998).