The Italian period is marked by extreme creativity and productivity. He settles in Venice for most of the time, but travels to Milan, to Bologna (with shows), Rome and several back and forth ventures to Vienna, a city he liked deeply (Rielke was a leitmotif of his sensibility, and an early German literature and fair knowledge of the language helped), has some longer interludes in Paris, where he meets some old friends, but does not seem to adhere to any place. Possibly the most fateful decision of his career came on the New Year's Eve of 1971 when he lands in Bucharest, with an expired passport, at a time when the regime was considering overstaying an exit visa (in this case by years) simply a crime. A stash of letters to his wife, explaining in part some of his torments in Venice, is lost, and what seems to sum up events is that he might not have felt able to support his new family (his only child was born in 1967) in Italy and his wife, Georgeta, was increasingly feeling under pressure to ask him to return, both because of the authorities which perceived his defection as suspect, harassing her, and her own insecurities. Disillusionment with the art practices he was exposed to is soon replaced by losing his job at the art institute, where he was demoted to a pay by the hour status, a condition that even though he later overcame delayed his promotion to full professorship. Due to his passing away at 53, it never happened. In some other sense, he had time to work and the few next years had the consolation of a certain calm of family life. Gradually he re-integrates in the artistic community and tends to work in many directions: etching, drawing, watercolor, book illustration; painting and of course teaching, where he gets attracted by technical explorations, e.g. preparing compounds, foundations and canvasses from scratch using ancient trade books. The paintings become much larger than before, he talks about the dream of painting alfresco vast surfaces in the outdoors. This never happens but he experiments a lot, to the point that he feared occasionally that his works may be vulnerable in time. Marking the signal of retrenchment to a rigid form of socialism, 1973 brings also a term to the artist's hope that the liberalization seen after 1965 will lead to an end of the regime. The only difference is that a brutal ideology is now serving a personal dictatorship.