Through his unsetting, uncanny, beautiful art, De Chirico aspires to unveil the secret essence of things, concealed behind the surface accessible to us through the senses.

To this regard his art is utterly philosophical, his pictures are investigations of the unknown, they don't describe, they inquire and by doing this they floor us as they dwell on that mysterious yet familiar limbo sited between ordinary and extraordinary reality, logic and absurd, physics and metaphysics.

If surrealists were focused on what dwelled within, De Chirico was totally concerned about the perceivable world: too easy spotting an enigma in the world of dreams, even banal, much more intriguing, on a philosophical level, is trying to depict it on the things we look at with our own eyes.

The Italian artist managed to do this in a wonderful way and this book concerns the marvelous path he undertook, underpinned on a constant, powerful, extraordinary combination of art and knowledge.