Then the postwar period arrived. Venice was throbbing with curiosity: the city in ferment seemed to shake itself, with the somewhat naive but spontaneous uproar that came from the blinding illusion of total liberty at hand, ready simply to be grasped.

Art was reinventing itself in the burning, more or less extemporary discussions at the Bottegon, in the almost riotous debates, often so incoherent, at Bevilacqua La Masa. Groups were formed. The New Arts Front discovers cosmopolitanism at all costs, which breaks down the barriers of the provincialism of feelings. There was a great fuss and by being in it, with a little bit of talent and luck, there is the chance of making a name for oneself, to become a flag for the newly emergent criciticism.
Lucatello participated and listened, with the angry anxiety of someone who doesn’t want to let the essential thing he was pursuing escape him. But his dialogue with painting was solitary, made up of jealous intimacy: he didn’t accept comparisons, connections, schools. He spent whole days in the revealing rooms of the Biennale, which bore luninous messages for the young artists gloomy for the dross of our national academical mentality.
Exuberant and generous, he had lots of friends and lots of women. Stories that he lived out with cheerful lack of seriousness, but in which he identified that incessant need to feel involved in the frenetic pulsation of life that assaulted him. Women would always be a constant subject of wonderful juxtaposition, on the faces of women that he drew and painted he would unload the gentleness, hope and resignation of human experience, and would end up by immersing them in nature to the point of breaking up the nude in the landscape.
But also, still very young, he fell in love. And it was to be the tie of a lifetime: made up of tenderness and respect, of sudden tumults and deep friendship, of conflicts at times bitter, but also of continuous new meetings. His family – and it was a large one – unreserved source for him, in the plan of a life where the yearning lyricism of a suspended mystery was mixed with the earthy taste of rigorous rationalism.