Giorgio de Chirico and the Italy That Was Never Home
A winter magazine cover borrows his empty piazza to sell crime. Before he was born, the station of his father’s railway at Volos already had its trains and a marble goddess. A Greek-born Italian who had lived in Italy for barely two years, he built his squares in Florence, Turin and Paris, perhaps from parts like these. The square is not a memory but an inheritance, and its long shadow runs from Dante’s empty tomb to a flat on the Piazza di Spagna.
I
The Borrowed Square
Giorgio de Chirico had been an Italian for twenty years before he lived in Italy.
Hold that sentence up beside the Winter 2026 cover of the Guardian Long Read, the crime issue, and the picture begins to shift. A raking shadow falls across empty ground. A tower stands against a flat sky. In the middle distance stands a fox; crows line the rooftops, and a trail of red drops runs down toward the reader. A crime scene needs a culprit and a loss, and the cover supplies both: the fox, and the blood.
The artist has not yet been announced, but the cover shows two influences: the vivid colour of the graphic artist Malika Favre, and the grammar of de Chirico, which has long outlived him. In a 2013 essay Ara Merjian lists a Simpsons Halloween episode in which a beehive’s shadow climbs the wall of a deserted street, and the PlayStation game Ico, whose cover draws on two of his paintings.
De Chirico was already copying it himself. In 1955, announcing James Thrall Soby’s exhibition, the Museum of Modern Art took care to say which girl with a hoop was real: The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914) was the only authentic early painting in which she appears. A version in Rome’s Museo Carlo Bilotti is signed and dated 1948; the museum thinks he painted it in the late 1960s. The grammar the illustrator borrows had already been remade, and backdated, by the man who invented it.
What his squares never had was a culprit. In 1917 Freud set the mourner beside the melancholic. In mourning, he wrote, “it is the world which has become poor and empty”; in melancholia it is the self. The melancholic knows whom, but not what, he has lost. On the afternoon his squares began, de Chirico remembered, the whole world looked “convalescent.” His piazzas have the mourner’s empty world and the melancholic’s unnamed loss, painted by a man who never said what was missing from them.
What was missing was a country, and it was missing because he had never had it. He was not an exile remembering Italy. He was an heir inventing it.
II
Born Beside His Father’s Railway
He was born on 10 July 1888 in Volos, on the Thessalian coast, where ancient Iolcus stood and the Argo sailed. His father, Evaristo, an engineer, had been born in 1841 at Büyükdere, on the Bosphorus. His mother, Gemma Cervetto, came of a Genoese family and was probably born in Smyrna. When the boy was baptised that July, the register entered his father as italo: Italian. On both sides the family had been Italian somewhere else for at least a generation, and the somewhere else was the Ottoman Levant. The citizenship was never in doubt. The country was.
Evaristo had built railways out of Constantinople and across Bulgaria before he came to Thessaly as the engineer in charge of its new line. On 22 April 1884 the first stretch, from Volos to Larissa, opened in the presence of King George I. For the occasion a white marble Athena, the work of an Italian sculptor, was set up at the station.
Four years later his son was born there. Read one way, the parts of the squares were standing in Volos before the painter existed: a station, a train, a marble goddess. De Chirico never said so, but in that reading the trains that cross the horizons of his piazzas, trailing their small white plumes behind high walls, are his father’s trains. In a 2004 essay the archaeologist Paul Zanker ties the Athena to the father as well.
De Chirico liked to compose his origins. An unsigned profile of 1919, attributed to him and written in the third person, gives him a Florentine father and a Genoese mother, and a childhood spent at play beside the sea that saw the Argonauts set sail. The sea was real. The Florentine father was an invention. The son could not make his father more Italian than the register already had, so he gave him an Italian birthplace.
His training was Greek too: from 1903 to 1906 he studied at the Athens Polytechnic. Evaristo died in 1905. In September 1906 Gemma took Giorgio and his younger brother Andrea, the future writer Alberto Savinio, out of Greece. After brief stops in Venice and Milan they went on to Munich, where Giorgio studied painting, looked hard at Böcklin and read Nietzsche. Only in June 1909 did the family settle in Milan. That summer, in his first months of living in Italy, he painted The Departure of the Argonauts. Zanker reads its statue as the Athena of Volos and as the father, with a sacrifice made at its foot, and Orpheus, singing, as the brother. If he is right, it is the first of de Chirico’s pictures to carry a memory of home, and the memory is his father in marble, receiving an offering as the Argo leaves the harbour where the painter was born.
III
The Bench in Santa Croce
One clear autumn afternoon in Florence, still convalescent himself from an intestinal illness, de Chirico sat on a bench in the Piazza Santa Croce. He had seen the square before. But that afternoon, he later wrote in French, it seemed to him that he was seeing everything “pour la première fois”, for the first time, and a painting composed itself before him. It became The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon, the first of his metaphysical squares.
In the middle of the piazza then, on a high pedestal, stood Enrico Pazzi’s marble Dante, unveiled in 1865. Dante was Florence’s most famous exile, banished in 1302, dead in Ravenna in 1321, and buried there still. Inside the basilica, Stefano Ricci’s monument to him, unveiled in 1830, is a cenotaph, a tomb without a body. It was Dante who taught Italians what exile tastes like. In the Paradiso his ancestor Cacciaguida foretells his banishment:
Tu proverai sì come sa di sale
lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle
lo scendere e ’l salir per l’altrui scale.You will learn how another’s bread tastes of salt, and how hard a road it is to go down and up another’s stairs.
In the same church lie the bones of Ugo Foscolo. He was born on Zakynthos in 1778 to a Venetian father and a Greek mother, died in exile at Turnham Green in 1827, and was brought to Santa Croce in 1871. Foscolo wrote the sonnet to the island he would never touch again: “Né più mai toccherò le sacre sponde / ove il mio corpo fanciulletto giacque.” Never again shall I touch the sacred shores where my body lay as a child. His Dei Sepolcri praises the tombs of Florence’s great men, which commentators place in Santa Croce, though the poem never names the church.
This is not influence but a constellation, in Walter Benjamin’s sense: a pattern legible only when its points are seen together. Metaphysical painting began with a Greek-born Italian on a bench, facing a statue of Italy’s founding exile, outside a church that holds that exile’s empty tomb and the reburied bones of another Greek-born Italian.
A native cannot see his own square for the first time; only someone arriving can. De Chirico’s revelation is usually read as metaphysics, Nietzsche’s lesson that the most ordinary things are strange. It was also a newcomer’s eye, recast as philosophy. Zanker reads the early squares as mourning for a lost Greek childhood. He may be right that the parts were Greek: the trains, the goddess, the sea. But the eye that looked at them from that bench belonged to a young man arriving in a country that was his only on paper. What he built from Greek parts was Italy.
Nietzsche had found his own city in Turin. He arrived there on 5 April 1888, three months before de Chirico was born, and two days later wrote to Heinrich Köselitz: “Das ist wirklich die Stadt, die ich jetzt brauchen kann!” This really is the city I need now. In 1910 de Chirico’s family moved to Florence, where his mother enrolled both sons with the military district. He passed through Turin in July 1911 on his way to Paris. He would come back, and the second time he would run.
IV
Paris, Capital of an Imagined Italy
He reached Paris on 14 July 1911, Bastille Day. A self-portrait of that year carries a Latin question: Et quid amabo nisi quod aenigma est? What shall I love, if not the enigma?
In 1912 the paper caught up with him: Italy called him up, and he went to Turin to answer. Zanker makes those Turin days, which ended in flight, the birth of the Piazze d’Italia. In de Chirico’s own account, which Zanker quotes, a man comes out into a square. A stone figure watches him as only statues can, a locomotive whistles somewhere behind a wall, and behind the square’s geometry there opens a nostalgia for the infinite. He fled the city that gave him the squares, and painted them from the city he fled to.
In Paris he built Italy from imported parts. Turin lent him its arcades and, in this reading, Volos its trains, though Zanker notes how little the painted squares have to do with the real ones of Turin, Florence or Rome. The Italy he built was nobody’s actual Italy. In the middle of the square he set Ariadne, the Cretan princess Theseus abandoned on Naxos, an island she had not chosen. He took her, Zanker adds, not from the ancient marble or even a cast, but from a line drawing in Salomon Reinach’s repertory of ancient statues, published in Paris in 1897. A Greek figure, on a plinth, in an Italian square, copied from a French book. The titles say the rest: The Nostalgia of the Infinite, Gare Montparnasse (The Melancholy of Departure).
Others were imagining Italy from its edges. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, born in Alexandria, had put Futurism on the front page of Le Figaro. In 1910, in a manifesto signed with Boccioni, Carrà and Russolo, he turned on Venice, the city “che noi pure amammo e possedemmo in un gran sogno nostalgico”: which we too loved and possessed in a great nostalgic dream. The manifesto’s remedy was to fill the canals with the rubble of the old palaces. Marinetti named nostalgia as the enemy; de Chirico wrote it into his titles. One wanted to bury the canals, the other emptied the squares.
Giuseppe Ungaretti, born in Alexandria in 1888 to parents from near Lucca, was in Paris from 1912 to 1914, where Apollinaire befriended him, as he had de Chirico. In a later poem, “Lucca,” his mother in Egypt tells the children about the Tuscan city after the evening rosary: an Italy learned as a bedtime story.
Then the elsewhere moved. When Italy went to war, an amnesty for deserters brought de Chirico home in May 1915, and the army gave him a desk in Ferrara. On Italian soil at last, and in Italian uniform, he stopped painting open squares. The pictures closed into crowded interiors of biscuits, set squares and maps. In 1917 he spent months in a military hospital for nervous disorders, while his brother, posted to Thessaloniki, back on Greek soil, wrote up the voyage as “The Departure of the Argonaut.”
Ungaretti, at the front, put it best. In “Italia,” dated 1 October 1916, he calls himself “un frutto / d’innumerevoli contrasti d’innesti”, a fruit of countless clashing grafts, and rests in his soldier’s uniform “come fosse la culla / di mio padre”, as if it were his father’s cradle. In May 1918, at Campo di Mailly on the French front, he wrote “Girovago”:
In nessuna
parte
di terra
mi posso
accasare
In no part of the earth can I make myself at home. Once these men, de Chirico among them, wore Italy’s uniform, the elsewhere moved with them.
V
The Returns
After the war he stopped arriving and started returning. At the end of 1919, in the Roman review Valori Plastici, he published “Il ritorno al mestiere,” the return to craft, and styled himself Pictor classicus. A self-portrait of 1920, now in Munich, answers the question of 1911: Et quid amabo nisi quod rerum metaphysica est? What shall I love, if not the metaphysics of things? In 1922 he painted The Prodigal Son, in which a father who is a statue lays his hand on the shoulder of a son who is a mannequin. A man with no home in Italy to go back to kept painting homecomings, and the father he came home to was one he had made himself.
In December 1927, after he and his brother, by then living in Paris again, had given interviews to a French paper, the painter and critic Cipriano Efisio Oppo attacked them in Rome’s La Tribuna under the headline “Fuoriuscitismo artistico.” Artistic exile: the press’s word for anti-Fascist émigrés. De Chirico had told the French that modern Italian painting did not exist, apart from Modigliani and himself, “but we are almost French.” Rome called him an exile, as an insult, and Keala Jewell has shown how often the brothers were cast as stateless and unpatriotic. Three years later Savinio declared that his words had been “wickedly distorted” and that the Italian spirit had reawakened, and the brothers, who had been shut out of the 1928 Biennale, showed at the next in a room called “Appels d’Italie”: calls of Italy.
Svetlana Boym defined nostalgia as a longing “for a home that no longer exists or has never existed.” Its restorative kind rebuilds the lost home and takes it for the truth; its reflective kind “thrives in algia,” the longing itself, and keeps putting off the homecoming. The young de Chirico practised the second kind; the old one turned to the first. From 1933 he repainted his early squares, dated some of them back to the 1910s, and called such pictures verifalsi, true fakes. In 1948 he sued the Venice Biennale over its room of metaphysical painting, which included, he declared, a fake Il Trovatore. He won in 1951. A man who forged his own past went to court to disown it.
In 1968, at eighty, he painted The Return of Ulysses. The hero rows a small boat across a patch of sea that lies on the floor of a bourgeois room like a rug. The homecoming has been brought indoors, and it never arrives.
For the last thirty years of his life, until his death on 20 November 1978, he lived at Piazza di Spagna 31. They say, he wrote, that Rome is the centre of the world and the Piazza di Spagna the centre of Rome, so that he and his wife lived at the centre of the centre of the world: “il colmo in fatto di antieccentricità,” the height of anti-eccentricity. It is a square named after another country.
V. S. Naipaul, a Trinidadian of Indian descent in an England he knew from books, named a novel after The Enigma of the Arrival and the Afternoon. His narrator imagines a story for the picture, a book he never writes: a traveller lands at a classical port, is swallowed by the city, and at last finds his way back to the quay to discover that his ship has gone and his life has been lived.
Elsewhere was never a place. It was the direction he faced from wherever he happened to be home.
⁂
The occasion is the Winter 2026 cover of The Guardian Long Read, Volume Five, “The crime issue,” listed for 10 November 2026; its artist has not yet been announced. Ara H. Merjian’s survey of de Chirico’s afterlife is “De Chirico’s ‘Long American Shadow’” (Italian Journal, 2013). The 1955 dating is from the Museum of Modern Art’s press release; the later Mystery and Melancholy of a Street belongs to the Museo Carlo Bilotti. The Volos Athena, The Departure of the Argonauts, the Turin days and the Reinach drawing follow Paul Zanker, “De Chirico und die Traurigkeit der Statuen” (Pegasus 6, 2004), who quotes the Santa Croce passage in de Chirico’s French from Paolo Baldacci; “convalescent” is from the English of the same passage, as quoted by Anthony DiRenzo and The Florentine. The baptismal register and the 1919 profile are from Paolo Picozza’s essay on Evaristo de Chirico (Metaphysical Art 11–13, 2014). The Athens years, the move to Florence, the call-up, the flight and the desk in Ferrara are from the Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico and Roderick Conway Morris; the 1948 lawsuit from G. Di Giulio’s account of it (Metafisica 22–23). The 1927 interviews, Oppo’s attack and Savinio’s statement are from Lorella Giudici’s account of them (Metaphysical Art 14–16, 2016), whose translations supply “but we are almost French” and “wickedly distorted.” Keala Jewell’s study is The Art of Enigma: The de Chirico Brothers and the Politics of Modernism (2004). The manifesto “Contro Venezia passatista” (1910) is quoted from the text at Memofonte; Svetlana Boym from The Future of Nostalgia (2001); Freud from James Strachey’s translation of “Mourning and Melancholia”; the house on the Piazza di Spagna from the Regione Lazio. Translations from Dante, Foscolo, Marinetti, Ungaretti, Nietzsche, de Chirico’s French, Freud’s German and the Latin are our own. Drafted with Claude Opus 5.5; literary and copy editing by Claude Sonnet 5.5; outside literary editing by Claude Fable 5.1. The header and interior images were generated with Gemini Argon for this essay.