On the walls of this room a series of works are installed, which all have the same title: Germoglio (Sprout). Among them is one of the earliest, shown in the artist’s solo exhibition at the Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble in 1991.

Developed in its definitive form in 1988 out of reflection on the “chaos of the seed” and the process that generates it, the sprout is a subject that lends itself particularly well to representing different phases of the life cycle, since in the first stage of its existence it is something simple and fragile, but one that can turn into something powerful and complex, like a tree. In the process that takes it from sprouting as a seed in the ground to becoming a plant, only to turn into a seed again and fall back to the ground, commencing a new cycle, it passes through a whole temporal sequence that goes from birth to death and then back to life. The sprout is a symbol of the force of nature, of the passage from darkness and chaos to light, of the fertility of the soil, of the cycle of the seasons and, in the last analysis, of the circular nature of life itself.

At the center of the same room stands Lente liquida (Liquid Lens), 1998 (2024). It is a work composed of four glass con- tainers, all of the same height but with different diameters, filled to the brim with water. They are united by a thin circle of copper and gold leaf placed on the top of them, which conveys the meaning of the work. The presence of water is closely connected with the natural process of which Germoglio too is part and that has been a focus of the artist’s interest since the 1990s. It is no coincidence that, from that moment on, attention to natural elements became a particularly frequent feature of the artist’s works, assuming a posi- tion of great significance in the development of his language. Like the sprout, water has a rich range of figurative meanings. Its ris- ing from the depths of the earth, its welling up on the surface as a spring, its forming of rivers, lakes and seas, its capacity to reach the sky through the process of evaporation and finally its return to earth in the form of rain make it a paradigm par excellence of the force of life, which it allows to perpetuate ceaselessly: “We come to our own, and make friends with matter, which the ambitious chatter of the schools would persuade us to despise. We never can part with it; the mind loves its old home: as water to our thirst, so is the rock, the ground, to our eyes and hands and feet.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson).

The motionless surface of the water creates a sense of diso- rientation in Lente liquida as, when viewed from a distance, it can easily be perceived as solid glass. In this case too the work draws our attention to the principle of the transformation of matter, which through evaporation passes from the liquid state to the gaseous one. Not coincidentally, for the entire duration of the exhibition, a small amount of water will have to be added every so often so that it remains at the same level as at the beginning. Thus is the work mutable and subject to transformation itself.

On the jamb of one of the windows of this room is positioned Nel momento (In the Moment), 1974 (2025), a work that has, as one of its characteristics, the fact that it can be adapted to the most diverse situations. As well as on the wall, it has been placed in the past on the ground (MAXXI—Museo nazionale delle Arti del XXI secolo, Rome, 2012) and on the inside wall of a yacht (Stella Maris, Viareggio, 2012). A capacity for adaptation that has its roots in the past, in the 1960s, when sculptures “had come down from the ped- estal” and begun to interact with the space around them, as in this case where the work will be visible from both inside the museum and outside it, from Piazza del Duomo.

The work originates from the tiny metal discards, small sheets of lead, that Salvadori found in 1974 when he moved into the house and studio on Via Pace in Milan, in which a zincographic printing works had previously been located. The form of Nel momento developed out of a grid that, initially drawn on a metal plate, created a pattern made up of geometric figures like the octagon, square and rhom- bus. Nel momento can be made of different metals, in this case silver: “The sheet of silver is the page. Its nature led me first of all to carve a grid onto it. The next cut was a request, a need for light that offered me openings, transformation, the bringing of light into the darkness of the substance that is inner attention” (Salvadori).

Nel momento implies a rituality since it is realized by means of a manual operation carried out by the artist on a metal plate, which is incised with a cutter and then bent according to a specific design. In this way it sets in motion a precise process whose aim is to get us to shift our attention onto the instant we are living in and to help us to become conscious, in that “moment,” of our being there.