Salvatore Fiume (23 October 1915 – 3 June 1997) was an Italian painter, sculptor, architect, writer and stage designer. His works are kept in some of the most important museums in the world, among which the Vatican Museums, the Hermitage of Saint Petersburg, the Museum of Modern Art of New York City, the Pushkin Museum of Moscow and the Galleria d'Arte Moderna of Milan.

Salvatore Fiume was born in Comiso, Sicily, in 1915. At the age of sixteen, thanks to his enthusiasm and his passion for art, he won a scholarship to attend the Royal Institute for Book Illustration at Urbino, where he mastered printing techniques from etching to lithography. He ended his studies at the age of twenty-one and moved to Milan, where he came into contact with intellectuals and artists such as Salvatore Quasimodo, Dino Buzzati and Raffaele Carrieri. In 1938, at the age of twenty-three, Fiume moved to Ivrea, where he became art director of Tecnica e organizzazione (Technique and Organization), a cultural magazine sponsored and overseen by Adriano Olivetti; during this time, he wrote his first successful literary work, the novel Viva Gioconda!, published in Milan in 1943 by editor Bianchi-Giovini.

Although the literary circle he attended was stimulating, he wanted to devote himself more to painting, and in 1946 he left Ivrea to settle in a 19th-century silk mill in Canzo, not far away from Como, where he began an intense and versatile search for pictorial, sculptural and architectural expression. In the same year, in Milan, a set of drawings in tempera and Indian ink was shown to the art critic Raffaele Carrieri and to the painter and writer Alberto Savinio, brother of the metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico, who was thrilled.

In 1949 he held his first official exhibition, which included Isole di statue and Città di statue, at the Galleria Borromini in Milan. It aroused much interest among the critics and resulted in him coming into touch with international cultural and artistic institutions; here works of the painter were bought both by the New York City Museum of Modern Art's director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., in order to display it in his museum, as well as by the Jucker collection of Milan. The next year, 1950, he was invited to the Venice Biennale to exhibit his triptych Isola di statue, which earned him a cover on Life.

In the same year he was invited by the architect Gio Ponti to create a large work of 48×3 metres which would be installed in the first class hall of the Andrea Doria, a famous and elegant ocean liner sunk in 1956 off Nantucket, Massachusetts. The big canvas, entitled Le leggende d'Italia, represented an imaginary Renaissance city rich in Italian masterpieces of 15th and 16th century.

In 1949 he was already working on a cycle of ten large paintings, commissioned by the industrialist Bruno Buitoni, Sr., entitled Le avventure, le sventure e le glorie dell'antica Perugia, which he finished in 1952; Fiume's interest in Renaissance painting, particularly in Piero della Francesca and Paolo Uccello can be inferred from these works. In 1953, the New York magazines Life and Time commissioned him to do some works depicting an imaginary story of Manhattan and New York Bay, envisioned by the painter as statue islands.

A period of contacts, travels and exhibitions around the world began. These travels were very important for Fiume because they helped him gather impressions, sounds, forms and colours of ancient and modern cultures, which increased his artistic personality, providing him the material for a global set of images, but always disciplined by the preponderance of the Mediterranean classical harmony.

In 1962, a hundred pictures of Fiume's toured through several German museums, including those of Cologne and Regensburg. In 1973, the artist went to the Babile valley, in Ethiopia, together with his friend, the photographer Walter Mori, where he painted a group of rocks with anticorrosive paints. A full-scale model of a section of these rock was made by Fiume for the big anthological exhibition of 1974 at the Palazzo Reale of Milan; this model covered almost all of the big Cariatidi Room. At the same exhibition, the Gioconda Africana, now kept by the Vatican Museums, was displayed for the first time. In 1975, the Calabrian village of Fiumefreddo Bruzio accepted Fiume's proposal to beautify the historical centre with some of his works for free. Between 1975 and 1976, the artist painted several walls of the ancient tumble-down castle, and, in 1977, the cupola of the San Rocco chapel. In the 1990s he erected a bronze sculpture in each of the squares of Fiumefreddo with a panoramic view of the sea.