I have often seen Massimo Turlinelli's works, and there was always something that I couldn't fully grasp. And, several times I asked myself what I could not understand in his paintings, what disturbed my eye and, above all, my mind. Yet everything seems simple, perhaps too much: "of course the passing inside is light". The landscapes favor theories of trees, mostly pines or cypresses, sometimes organized and almost in parade, sometimes scattered over a territory that suggests Leopardi's infinite spaces. Sometimes very rigorous images, with an almost geometric rigor, like an engineer; sometimes imaginative, fairytale, as if invented, as an architect. Something, however, still wasn't clear to me. My idea of the landscape is Tuscan, that is, a skilfully constructed landscape in which the farmer designed and intervened, leaving nothing to chance; he has been able to gradually modify the countryside over the centuries, he made it his image and likeness, he gave it no respite, he rationalized it; he added the necessary and removed "the too much and the unnecessary"; there is not a stretch of Tuscan countryside that does not have at least a sufficient reason for its accommodation. Turlinelli's campaign is, in some moments, at least more lyrical, it seems to suggest something atavistic, remembered, suggested by a childhood memory. Some time ago, going with Massimo to the Marche. in Fermo, at his house, I suddenly understood what was bothering me, what was inconsistent, uneven, in his drawings. The contamination of the memories of the land of his origin ("he looked ... the sea from afar, and then the mountain") with the present observation of the land of adoption. Massimo Turlinelli chose to study in Florence, "starting" from his region and from his Fermo, pursuing those cultural suggestions that an art lover cannot miss, even if today Florence has lingered a bit in second thoughts that, perhaps, they have prevented a serious, modern development. The art of Turlinelli, therefore, can only be explained in this way: when the memories of a landscape of childhood and adolescence are connected with the more mature and adult sensations suggested by the structured reality of the Tuscan landscape revisited daily. But there is more. The solicitations of moments of great importance, too often negative, of our time, forced the artist into the open, they extracted him from his dream world and led him to the painful vision of today and of our history, to demonstrate the impossibility of placing oneself in a hyperuranium, Olympic, ataraxic world, devoid of passions and suffering. And, why not, also of joys.