He returned to Palermo in 1874 and won a competition for a four-year grant, which enabled him to study and open a studio for sculpture in Florence.

In 1878, he also completed a life-size stucco of il Ciceruacchio, a statue of the Italian patriot Angelo Brunetti and his thirteen-year-old son, depicting them at the moment of their execution in 1849 by Austrian troops.

The next year at the Paris Salon, he displayed La Pesca meravigliosa, where a fisherman rescues a bathing maiden.

At the Mostra of Rome, he displayed The assassination of Julius Caesar; and at the Exposition of Venice, Ragazzi messi in fila.

Ximenes was involved in many of the major official monumental projects in Italy from the 1880s on and devoted his energies as from 1911 primarily to commissions for important public works in São Paulo, Kyiv, New York and Buenos Aires.