Furio Cavallini

Furio Cavallini was born in Piombino (Livorno) in 1929. He is the first of three brothers of a working-class family who in 1941, due to the war, moved to Riparbella (Pisa), his father's hometown, in the hills of the upper Maremma. between Cecina and Volterra. He works with his father in the cutting of the forest until 1945, in a dramatic period due to the war between the German and American armies. In 1946 the family returned to Piombino and Furio, like his father, also went to work as a metalworker in large-scale industry.
His vision of reality is concretized in the need to portray things and people. Thus he began to occasionally attend the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. In 1952 he left the factory and moved to Florence. In 1953 he went to live in Milan, attended the Brera Academy and participated in the cultural life of the time.
In 1956 he was forced to hospitalize in a sanatorium in Florence due to a severe pulmonary crisis and at the same time he successfully exhibited his works from the Milanese period. Having recovered early from his illness, however, he had to return to Piombino due to serious family difficulties, always continuing to work as a clerk and to paint.
In 1960 he meets Deanna, his life partner, with whom he has two children; in 1966 he decides to go and live with his family in Florence where he realizes successful exhibitions.
In 1967 he was called to teach as an assistant at the art school. Teaching and painting absorbed him completely, but the memory of the Lombard metropolis pushed him to move back to Milan in 1973 with his wife and children, becoming the holder of the chair of figure drawn at the Art School of Busto Arsizio (Varese).
In 1977 he abandoned teaching and devoted himself entirely to painting, setting up exhibitions in Italy and abroad.
Following a creative crisis, in 1987 he left Milan and moved his studio to the spaces of the former asylum in Trieste.
In 1997 he returned with his wife to Riparbella, the town of his adolescence. In 2004 he moved to Cecina where he died in 2012.

Source: Press office for the Flangini Association, Purgatory exhibition. The suspended