From the Impressionists onward, the theme of the urban view has been among the dearest to contemporary painting. A reportage of the teeming life of the cities back then, and with the avant-gardes a transfigured emblem of the modernist impulse, in the years between the two wars and still today it is, at its highest, the site of reflection on the contemporary world: from disillusionment with modernity itself to the denunciation of the forced and violent urbanism that alters the appearance of cities and the substance of their social relations. Born in 1954 in Reggio Emilia but bound to Perugia ever since he first moved there to study at the local Academy of Fine Arts, in his recent return to painting Riccardo Secchi favours this perspective, entrusting to the intuition of a single glance sensitive accounts of the changing face of the city, its inhabitants, and the surrounding landscape. Images of the city's ancient medieval streets stand beside those of the ruins of a recent but now abandoned industrial past, or of the expanses of ploughed fields barely reachable beyond the city walls, with no wish to pass judgment, but under the sign of a wide-open gaze upon a fleeting reality. The mere ability to see, however, is nothing without the contribution of a masterly technique. And this comes down to Secchi still intact from his youthful apprenticeship in Assisi with the American William Congdon, a leading figure of postwar action painting, a master at teaching him to grasp reality in its phenomenal essence of line and colour, which is matter distilled from light. Working in the furrow of a modern figuration mindful of both Sironi and Mafai, there is a quality of synthesis in Secchi's painting, pursued through calibrated chromatic layers applied à plat, often resorting to the palette knife, over which the line literally carves out the profile of things. Thus in this recent and monumental Via Appia, a place already so many times a subject of local and non-local vedutismo, the perspectival recession of the houses and of the long central stairway resolves into a sequence of volumes built with a vigorous palette of reds, pinks, and bright yellows that play in contrast with the untouched white of the snow on the roofs and the earthy profile of the low stone walls. Scattered wayfarers and the tracks left along the way by those who came before them, a slow excavation that brings the trodden ground back up from the solid white mass, instead evoke the muffled, suspended atmosphere of the snowy day, the moment in which the flow of life slows and nature unveils to us our deepest truths.