[5] In addition to “Via Consolare”, Testori contributed to other magazines, such as “Architrave” of Bologna and “Pattuglia di Punta”, with articles dedicated especially to contemporary artists (from Scipione to Manzù and Carlo Carrà).

Manifesto del Realismo di pittori e scultori, signed, as well as by Testori himself, by Giuseppe Ajmone, Rinaldo Bergolli, Egidio Bonfante, Gianni Dova, Ennio Morlotti, Giovanni Paganin, Cesare Peverelli, Vittorio Tavernari and Emilio Vedova.

In his thesis, La forma nella pittura moderna, he considered the evolution of form in early 20th century European painting, declaring that the search was ongoing for a shared attitude to Italian realism.

The last chapter, Fisica dello spirito, is a sort of manifesto in which he declares the need for a renewal of art in sacred spaces, which could be achieved if clients and artists were to come to terms with the language of the avant-garde, from Picasso to Léger.

[12] His first period as a painter concluded with the frescoes, now lost, of the Four Evangelists, created in 1948 on the columns supporting the dome of the presbytery in the church of San Carlo al Corso in Milan, and the tormented Crucifixion (1949), now exhibited at Casa Testori.

Alongside his pictorial research, in the late 1940s Testori's enthusiasm for the theatre grew, due in part to his friendship with Paolo Grassi and his attendance at the newly created Piccolo Teatro.

In 1953, Testori published in “Paragone” an article on the 17th century painter Carlo Ceresa, from Bergamo, while he continued throughout the decade to support the activity of his friend Ennio Morlotti, who exhibited at the Galleria del Milione (1953), the Venice Biennials (1952, 1956) and the Quadrennial of Rome (1959).

This was set among the cycling clubs of the Lombard province and outskirts, to which the author returned repeatedly to give a voice, laying bare their inner dramas, to the depths of humanity, using the same method that he had used in art criticism and practice, and in his theatrical invention.

After overcoming numerous problems of censorship, it was given for the first time at the Teatro Eliseo by the company of Rina Morelli and Paolo Stoppa, directed and staged by Luchino Visconti.

When in February 1961, the play reached the Teatro Nuovo of Milan, the day before the première the magistrate Carmelo Spagnuolo signed an order for the seizure of the scripts and the suspension of all repeat performances programmed.

Testori and Feltrinelli faced criminal charges for the text, considered “greatly offensive to common feelings of decency”,[17] especially for the story linking Eros, the hero's brother, and Lino, the boy with whom he is in love.

Testori's linguistic experimentalism was meanwhile brought to nationwide attention by Alberto Arbasino who, in an article published in “Verri” of 1960, coined for himself, for the writer from Novate Milanese and for Pier Paolo Pasolini, the happy appellation of “the engineer's grandchildren”, thereby recognizing  the origin of their research in the plurilinguism of Carlo Emilio Gadda.

He is a key character to an understanding of Testori's involvement with the theatre, the evolution of his relationship with Luchino Visconti and the birth of the gallery named Compagnia del Disegno.

Much of the author's erotic and sentimental imagery is linked to Toubas, whose lineaments Testori poetically saw in many of the paintings he most loved, such as Tanzio da Varallo's David.

[18] Testori was working at this time on Erodiade, a play initially conceived for Valentina Cortese and repeatedly announced by the Piccolo Teatro di Milano but never programmed there.

The text incarnated the linguistic theories of the author, being the fruit of a pastiche in which dialectal inflections coexist with terms derived from Spanish, French and Latin, as well as many neologisms.

L'Ambleto made its debut in Milan on 16 January 1973, inaugurating the Salone Pier Lombardo, the theatre newly founded by Testori himself with Franco Parenti, Andrée Ruth Shammah, Dante Isella and Maurizio Fercioni.

Testori's friendship with Parenti gave birth to the idea, initiated with Ambleto, of a “trilogia degli scarozzanti (travelling players)”, an imaginary “company of actors wandering around the lakes and the foothills of the Alps, putting on, here today, there tomorrow, famous plots, chopped and changed to suit their resources”.

In the following years, Testori published monographs on his beloved artists from the more realist trend of the Northern Italian Renaissance: Romanino e Moretto alla Cappella del Sacramento (1975), dedicated to the pictorial decorations in the chapel of that name in San Giovanni Evangelista in Brescia; a recognition of the paintings by Giovanni Battista Moroni in Val Seriana (1977) and a first reassessment of the work of the 18th century sculptor Beniamino Simoni at Cerveno (1976).

Testori continued to promote, through a series of exhibitions in private galleries, the work of modern and contemporary figurative artists from Gianfranco Ferroni to Cagnaccio di San Pietro, Cristoff Voll, Antonio García López, Pierre Combet Descombes, Abraham Mintchine, Max Beckmann, Helmut Kolle, Willy Varlin, Federica Galli, Francis Gruber, José Jardiel, Paolo Vallorz and many others.

This context gave birth to Conversazione con la morte: a monologue published by Rizzoli in 1978 and written for Renzo Ricci, after seeing his interpretation of the old servant Firs in Strehler's production of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard.

This was the period in which Testori developed close links with several young people of the ecclesiastical movement Comunione e Liberazione, finding common ground with its founder, Luigi Giussani.

Testori's contributions always had a strong ethical and moral impact on public opinion, making them the ideal successors to the “Corsair Writings” of Pasolini, who had died in November 1975.

Many of his most significant pieces on news items or reflections of an ethical, social and religious nature were gathered by the author himself, together with others that had appeared in “Il Sabato”, in the volume La maestà della vita, published by Rizzoli in 1982.

Andrea Soffiantini was the actor of a monologue structured in fourteen parts, like a via crucis, in which a foetus, from its mother's womb, is compelled to conquer, with much effort, the gift of speech, in order to implore its parents not to renounce to its birth.

For the figures from the German scene he considered most interesting (such as Hermann Albert, Peter Chevalier, Thomas Schindler, Rainer Fetting, Bern Zimmer and Klaus Karl Mehrkens), he identified a group of his own invention which he called the “Nuovi ordinatori (New Ordinators)” (headed by Hermann Albert) which he distinguished from the “Neuen Wilden (New Wild Ones” led by Rainer Fetting), almost as if finding continuity of language between Expressionism and the New Objectivity of the inter-war years.

In the same year, Testori published a catalogue raisonné for Abraham Mintchine and promoted an exhibition for the artist at the Compagnia del Disegno gallery in Milan via a resounding article in Corriere della sera.

Testori had high praise for Abraham Mintchine artwork and was puzzled by the naïveté of modern art history narratives which were able to miss on such extraordinary talent (predicting he will be nevertheless rediscovered).

The following 13 December, for a single evening, the show was staged on the steps of the Stazione Centrale di Milano, the setting for the drama which dealt with the still contemporary theme of heroin addiction.

It was performed by Testori himself and Branciaroli at the Piccolo Teatro of Milan on 20 June 1989 and was published posthumously at the author's wish, since he preferred to leave himself free to “recreate” the text every evening in the theatre.