Sem: His name, so easy to pronounce in every language of the world, and his way of being, which enabled him to communicate with anyone, had made of him, a living legend.
It is never easy to expound a legend, but we'll try to understand, at least, how it was born. The sources are two: First, his knowledge of marble; the profound respect he had for it; his capacity to x-ray it with just one glance, and secondly, having been able to give each sculptor his stone; his block; his dimensions. Many testimonies over the decades bring to light this aspect, most of all, the French sculptor Ivan Avoscan's sincere admission: Without you, many of us would not be who we are.
As a sort of priest and teacher with Socratic maieutics, Sem would always assist the sculptors first encounter with the stone.
Coming from all over the world with the sole purpose of fulfilling the dream of standing with both feet on a glorious miracle of nature, how could these sculptors not become fascinated with that little man that treated marble with such absolute confidence? Like an alchemist, he was able to bring out of the apparently formless and unpredictable blocks exactly what was in their heads. There was no magic behind all this but a long and patient apprenticeship, a slow daily training through which in the course of many years, marble had sedimented in Sem in the same way that through the centuries it had sedimented in the mountains. Sem never stopped studying it, for this reason he knew so much about it, aware of the millenniums necessary for nature to form it, and of the hard work required of the quarrymen to extract it. He considered it a precious substance and demanded it be given its due value.
The sure knowledge of its value lead him to participate, without reserves, in the bet that was played out at the beginning of the 60's on the reintroduction of marble, based on the resurgence of a dialog with contemporary art, a bet that today can safely be defined as historic. In that period began the collaboration between the artisans of marble and the sculptors, a bond so strong that their existences were soon to become inexorably entwined. Sem was not an artist, but it would be extremely restrictive to speak of him only as the executor; he was interpreter, advisor and friend to many of the world's greatest contemporary sculptors, and teacher to countless young ones that had arrived here from every continent. He participated not only in the sensibility and creativity of each artist but evidently in their conflicts as well, he knew how to understand the impulses of their souls. "We have filled the world with sculpture" he declared once in an interview, not with the presumption of the creator, but with the pride of the interpreter.