At the age of sixteen, thanks to his enthusiasm and his passion for art, he won a scholarship to attend the Royal Institute for Book Illustration at Urbino, where he mastered printing techniques from etching to lithography.

He ended his studies at the age of twenty-one and moved to Milan, where he came into contact with intellectuals and artists such as Salvatore Quasimodo, Dino Buzzati and Raffaele Carrieri.

In 1938, at the age of twenty-three, Fiume moved to Ivrea, where he became art director of Tecnica e organizzazione (Technique and Organization), a cultural magazine sponsored and overseen by Adriano Olivetti; during this time, he wrote his first successful literary work, the novel Viva Gioconda!, published in Milan in 1943[2] by editor Bianchi-Giovini.

Although the literary circle he attended was stimulating, he wanted to devote himself more to painting, and in 1946 he left Ivrea to settle in a 19th-century silk mill in Canzo, not far away from Como, where he began an intense and versatile search for pictorial, sculptural and architectural expression.

In the same year he was invited by the architect Gio Ponti to create a large work of 48×3 metres which would be installed in the first class hall of the Andrea Doria, a famous and elegant ocean liner sunk in 1956 off Nantucket, Massachusetts.

These travels were very important for Fiume because they helped him gather impressions, sounds, forms and colours of ancient and modern cultures, which increased his artistic personality, providing him the material for a global set of images, but always disciplined by the preponderance of the Mediterranean classical harmony.

As a sculptor, he made his debut in 1994 with an exhibition for the Galleria Artesanterasmo of Milan, though his beginnings in sculpture in wicker, ceramics, bronze, marble, resin and other materials dates back to the 1940s and the strong plastic-architectural interpretation which recurs also in the pictorial production is undeniable.

So, at the age of seventy nine, Fiume personally created remarkably big sculptures, such as Le tre grazie, from the plasticine model to the final form in painted resin: a considerable commitment which, according to his relatives, contributed to undermine the artist's health.