Born in 1918 in Loro Ciuffenna, a small village north of Arezzo, Venturino passed hours watching his father, and began working with stone to satisfy his insatiable need to create.
Their family was forced to emigrate because of his anti-fascist father, taking his family first to France, then to Luxembourg. Here, Venturino and his sisters learned Italian by reading the the Divine Comedy and the Adventures of Pinocchio.
Venturis artistic training began abroad, than continued in Florence, Italy. He studied at the Accademia di Belle Arte, fascinated by the legendary names that have made this city.
Florence in that period was the hotspot of intense intellectual activity. Venturino frequented the Giubbe Rosse Caffè, where he met different well known characters of that period, such as Ottone Rosai (Top 5 HL), Giuseppe Ungaretti, Eugenio Montale, and others.
For Venturi, friendships and art have always had a profound importance, convinced that works of art had their own spirituality.
For example, portraiture was used in order to get close enough to a soul, to gently touch it, without violating it.
He rarely separated from his work. He created an inseperable link between himself and the subjects in his work, referring to them as if they were real presences in the studio: “That’s Pratolini … that’s Rosai, see how he was agitated …”
In 1940 he was called to arms on the Greek-Albanian front, where his artistic skills qualified him to design maps of enemy lines. This marked the beginning of his problems. Venturino slept with three other comrades inside a cabin, and one snowy winter night, the location was obliterated by a tank. Rescuers thought that no one had survived, and Venturini spent a night immersed in the snow, on a mountain, with his right leg almost gone, alone, amongst the remains of his scattered companions with whom just hours before was sharing cigarettes. Venturi was hospitalized for four years in Careggi hospital, undergoing twenty-four operations to reconstruct his leg.
War, along with the hospitalization scarred him forever, instigating reflections on death and rebirth. The end of the war, in 1945, he finally embraces a positive and successful period. He produced his first solo exhibition in Florence and series of exhibitions to follow. The serenity lasts only a short while and his life is turned upside down again in 1952, with a strong psychological disturbance. In Collodi, he enters the international competition to create a monument to Pinocchio, but unfortunately his victory is to be shared- he ties with Emilio Greek. The task is huge, and he works relentlessly for 2 years on the park, creating a 900 m2 mosaic while Greek had the task of sculpting Pinocchio. This task was never completed, and anger, disappointment and fatigue of this situation threw him into a deep depression, which required another two years of hospitalization, this time in the asylum of San Salvi, from 1957-1959. Venturi makes the most of his time in the hospital by drawing, painting and sculpting. Pinocchio was his favorite subject: he would draw on large sheets and paint on the tiles. To this day, you can still find the tile markings on the back of the lead drawings. Forty of these large designs were found, years later. Contours and violent colors were made with coal, oil and pastel. The color he would use with greatest intensity was bright red, which represented rebirth and anger. Venturi did not like to talk about the disease: “Yes, it was a bad three years … but at that time I produced a lot … I made several Pinocchios, as well as worked on other subjects … man, for me, is constantly reborn, life is a continuous resurrection … you can call all my work a resurrection ” In the year 1960, in splendid artistic form, he exhibited at the Florence Strozzina. He will spend years following this exhibition developing major works and exhibitions in private and public galleries. From devastating experiences broke out a conscious artist who never again relapsed in the agony of depression. He participated successfully in national and international exhibitions and established in 1993, in the house of his native village Loro Ciuffenna, the Venturino Venturi Museum and Documentation Center for 20th century Italian sculpture. Here he died in January 2002, after designing the last pen drawings including one dedicated to the tragedy of the “Twin Towers” in New York.