An “age-long vigil watching over leaning ruins” is the idea developed by Salvadori in his work Continuo Infinito Presente for the synagogue of Ostia Antica. The memory that has preserved the sacral nature of this place over the centuries is today entrusted to the secular vigil of a contemporary artist. Consisting of an iron cable coiled around a core to create a perfect circle with no beginning or end, Continuo Infinito Presente has a long history in Salvadori’s repertoire. It was conceived in the early 1980s on the small scale of 22 centimeters and it made its first public appearance in 1985 at the Locus Solus gallery in Genoa, hung on the wall like an icon. This position was maintained for over ten years until the retrospective at the Pecci Museum, Prato, in 1997, when Salvadori decided to transfer it from the wall into space. The marked a radical shift: from object of contemplation to object engaged in dialogue with architectural structure and the body. The increase in diameter from twenty-odd centimeters to a few meters altered its “spatial faculty” substantially. It was shown in this form in Vienna in 1996, in Milan three years later, and then in Berlin. The version presented in the Manifattura d’Arte Manifattura Tabacchi, Florence, in 2001 confirmed the connection with architectural structure. Now five meters in diameter, Continuo Infinito Presente embraced a column beside the name Emil Molte written on the wall in block capitals as a tribute to the German industrialist who first commissioned Rudolf Steiner to build a company kindergarten.
In the work at Ostia Antica, the ring is again made of iron and lies in the main chamber of the synagogue watched over by the four surviving columns. It embraces and coagulates countless stone fragments. One of these belongs to it like a stone in a ring and another is amazingly similar to Momento, the inexhaustible series of lead sheets that Salvadori has been deftly cutting and folding since 1973 to construct intricate embroideries of solid and void, light and shadow, all different, as shown by the walls on which they proliferate. At Ostia Antica, however, Continuo Infinito Presente holds a surprise. The riddle of its construction is revealed in the ruins. The ends of the cable wound around the core that gives it shape take its place in the seventh turn, entwined forever. A place within the place. It was from there that the people gathered on the day of inauguration listened to an exposition of the rationale of Art in Memory.