Creativity at its best: making science by making art

Creativity and vision capability are common to many disciplines and are involved in artistic and scientific thinking and activities. Scientists and artists are often asked to see and think beyond the perceivable reality, to imagine aspects of things and events, which can be better seen from an unusual perspective. Developing such a open-wide perspective to foster the spread of scientific knowledge in high-school is one of the key ingredient of "Art & Science across Italy", a European science communication project led by the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) in collaboration with CERN. The main idea is to put in practice the basic concept of the STEAM field in which neither STEM nor arts are privileged over the other, but both are equally in play and engaging high school students with science using artistic languages, regardless of student's specific skills or level of knowledge. During the project, high-school students attend scientific seminars and then, inspired by science, create their own artworks. The latter are shown in local and national art shows. The project is now running the third edition (2020 2022). Here we will describe the project and the methodology used, and some results obtained in the first two editions in which more than 7.500 students coming from about 200 Italian high schools participated.