Luciano Chinese was born in Friuli, in the town of Gorizia, on September 2nd 1942, the last of three brothers, in a period in which the war was still far from ending. The family suffered all the problems related to the fact that the father had been deported to Germany, forcing the mother to work relentlessly in order to keep the family.
The mother was the daughter of an chair manufacturer, she was cultured but, being a woman, was forced to renounce her studies and work as a factory hand. Nonetheless she sent her oldest child, Mario, to study in Venice. When he was five years old, Luciano Chinese left Gorizia for Grado and when he returned he felt somewhat estranged… He attended the local junior school and amongst his classmates was Dino Zoff, with whom he maintained a friendship.
At the age of thirteen he moved to Venice to attend the State Artistic Lyceum. He would later take his high school diploma at the Artistic Lyceum and than he attended the architecture faculty, in Venice He had a number of famous teachers, as Carlo Scarpa, Bruno Zevi…; he knew Mario Botta as a student and he was in a work group with him. He attended some lessons of Emilio Vedova in Salzburg.
His precocious vocation for painting convinced him to attend the Academy of Fine Arts, under the guidance of the maestro Bruno Saetti.
While he was studying in Venice, he came into direct contact with the local intellectual groups and made the acquaintance of important Italian and foreign personalities.