Giovanni Philippone was born in Sicily, in San Giovanni Gemini (Agrigento), in 1922. First of five children, a merchant father, he enjoyed economic well-being until 1926, when due to an economic measure called "quota ninety" which caused the bankruptcy of the companies that had economic relations with foreign countries, the family found itself in serious difficulty. He attended the gymnasium in the Jesuit boarding school in Pedara, and his interest in artistic subjects matured and the decision to enroll in the artistic high school in Palermo, where he obtained his diploma in 1942. Among his high school mates, who will then also be classmates Academy in Palermo: A. Sanfilippo, C. Accardi, U. Attardi and P. Consagra. These were poor years of economic resources (there was no paper on which to draw, let alone the colors!): Many drawings of those years are made on the back of the ration cards. But these are the years full of enthusiasm, ideas, cultural exchanges with friends and fellow academics. Numerous correspondence remains as evidence of this. The painting of those war years, and more than painting we can speak of graphics, being mainly drawings and sketches, speaks of domestic places, of family scenes, of mothers and sisters intent on what are simple everyday gestures; of peasants and young shepherds caught in moments and breaks at work. All with a simple, decisive, essential line. It was during the war years and following his disasters that the need to unite the religious ideals he had been raised and educated with the political ones of a left that hoped for a world without prevarications arose in him. For all the cowardice it will oscillate between these two poles: on the one hand a religiosity without schemes or dogmas, but lived internally, and on the other The yearning for the construction of a better world where man, architect of his own destiny, finds himself the protagonist and aware of their choices. In 1946 he moved to Milan where he attended the last year of Accodemia and obtained his diploma. It is the year of the diaspora. of the group of friends who for years had shared ideas, love for art, hunger and dreams. In fact, Sanfilippo and Accardi move to Florence, Consagra and Attardi to Rome. And from there the different personal stories and the different artistic paths begin. Also in 1946, he created an enormous fresco representing a rural scene for the town hall of his country, to which he periodically returns. The  The theme of work in the fields will be a constant theme in his painting, which underlines how an artist places himself in relation to social reality. In this regard, during an interview Philippone had to declare: "an artist always remains tied to his land, to his native country, and his country is not only nature, but men with their problems, their anxieties and aspirations and with their sometimes unconscious poetic vision of the world. In 1948, again for his town, he frescoed the apse and painted the canvases on the vault of the church of the Madonna del Carmelo. Still in '48, having returned to the north, he moved for about a year to Mount Olympus  in the house of the Picardo brothers.