Prologue

I learnt to read and write with my father, sitting under a cherry tree in the evening. He also taught me to swim, but he did not know how, or could not, or would not, who can say, to teach me a trade. These are the three fundamental precepts, teachings and obligations a father has towards his son (I believe they are in the Pirkei Avot): reading&writing, swimming, and a trade. Two are obvious enough, but why swimming? The ironic, predictable answer: because the Red Sea does not part every time you want it to; but the truth is simpler: I was born in Trieste. And so, to learn a trade and above all because poverty was grinding, I started working when I was little more than a child. I was twelve, and I went to work as a baker. For many years I worked as a labourer, and getting out of bed at three in the morning was hard, but harder still was bearing the heaviness of the trade. Everything was heavy: the sacks of flour to pour into the kneading machine, the lumps of dough to lift out of it, the boards laden with loaves to carry to the proving cells, and the baskets of bread I carried on my shoulders from the bakery to the shop.

Then, having had the luck to find a good master, I moved on under his guidance to pastry-making. No more brutal early risings, no more weights to lift and shift, and a considerably more substantial wage too, with the satisfaction of a far more refined craft. That lasted some fifteen years and then, tired of the routine, I quit. I took a long holiday. Two months in Florence, of churches, museums and concerts, trying to understand what I really wanted to do with my life. In truth one can hardly say I ever really understood it, given how things went afterwards.

In the meantime, naturally, obviously, rather, politics, and a few short-lived love affairs.

The text I was formed on politically? It may make hard-line Marxists smile and will make any political scientist laugh: Bertrand Russell’s Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism, which I never read again. On the other hand I was a trade unionist from boyhood to the very end of my working life, and I never regretted it. I had also dispatched, as an external candidate and fairly quickly, the matter of the middle-school certificate and the school-leaving diploma; so why not try university? Veterinary medicine! against all the ambitions and the little talent I believed I had. Hence the emigration to Perugia. An amusing experience: living as a student roughly ten years late, in a quiet provincial town, while around the country bombs were going off and shots were being fired. The so-called Years of Lead lived through in a sort of half-sleep. I never took my degree in veterinary medicine, and I have no regrets about that. Once I had finished more or less all the preparatory courses, without honours and with a single true disgrace (I had smoked a joint before the biochemistry exam, and made such a fool of myself that I am still ashamed of it), it was time, as they say, to start getting my hands dirty: stables, henhouses, kennels and so on. Let us say I realised fairly quickly, and radically, that I had no vocation for it; but I also feared ending up in yet another stalemate. Chance, caso, which in Italian is also an anagram of chaos, caos, luck, destiny, necessity? Who can say? Certainly not I.

A coup de théâtre

and life seems to change all at once, but perhaps, much more simply, it just goes on.

Without my doing anything concrete to make it happen, I was offered the task of looking after a library and media centre devoted specifically to the performing arts, which they were trying to bring to life inside the city theatre. I had no qualification and no competence for it, only a fair curiosity about theatre, cinema, music and literature, an amateur’s minestrone with no solid foundations, which for that matter I never truly acquired; and in any case I would never have thought of turning into a trade what was a pleasure, a desire to understand a little better, however haphazardly, what on earth I was doing in the world.

Anyway, with some astonishment and plenty of brass neck, from one day to the next I gave up dogs, cats, pigs and cows and began working as a librarian, or rather, began working in a library, because I never really learnt to be a librarian: technically speaking, I absorbed very little library science. For more than thirty years I muddled along among books, records and videotapes, reading, watching, sometimes cataloguing, in exchange for a salary, modest, certainly, but safe and never sweated for. I partially absolved myself of the guilt of having stolen that modest salary for so long by inventing the fable that they were paying me to study (in reality, to read and glean among the books), and so, when necessary, I did what is now called, the phrase is a little pompous, reference librarianship, which in my case meant helping young people, mostly first-year humanities students, find their way among books, objects with which most of them had little familiarity. Now, generalising shamelessly, as far as I can tell the relationship between students and books does not seem to have improved much; but that no longer concerns me directly, though it saddens me a little. Back to the library: we were, with us at least, at the dawn of the digital age, and so the system had to be computerised and an internal network built to make the few machines we had talk to one another. Two for internal use and two for readers. Nobody knew where to begin; the technicians and specialists we consulted, given the software we had adopted (it was free, that is why we had adopted it!), gave up after the first attempt. We discovered by chance that the most competent person both on the library side (he had written the only user manual for that program) and on the technical side (he was working on computerising the University library) worked a few steps away from us. Francesco Dell’Orso (on Francesco see: http://www.riccardoridi.it/esb/fdo2016-pangaro.htm, so I shall not repeat myself). Francesco solved every technical problem and we became friends. He loved cinema and often came by to borrow a videotape to watch at home at his ease. It was thanks to Francesco that I met Luigi Cimmino. A philosopher, a lover of cinema, painting and literature, that is, of some of the things I dealt with, so to speak, professionally. With Luigi we talked about cinema; often, coming out of a lecture, he would ring the bell of my office, I would come down, and we would go first for a coffee and then, strolling through some alley, for a cigarette. And talk upon talk, almost only about cinema (other things too, but little): it was the time when Stanley Kubrick’s last film was coming out, posthumously, and so down we went, discussing the film but also the Schnitzler novella it was drawn from. With the idea of digging deeper into the themes and problems of the relationship between the two works we organised a seminar which, though it did not clarify all that much, gave us the idea of turning it into a book. Bringing in a number of scholars from different disciplines, with Daniele Dottorini we made the book, a collection of essays comparing the two works, the literary and the cinematic. Seven more have followed so far. For over ten years now, with Massimo Capponi, we have been putting a couple of issues of Studi Umbri online every year. In the meantime Luigi must have published at least three or four more books, much more technical I believe, belonging to the discipline he taught for many years, philosophy, but with an interest, and a competence, ranging across enough disciplines to frighten an amateur like me. I close, to justify what at first sight (at second too, perhaps) may look like a banal, hasty and somewhat presumptuous biographical note, by making clear that my only intent was to highlight Luigi’s generosity, and not only his intellectual generosity: for if I have ever written, and published, two lines worth reading, it is only to his credit (or his fault, from another and perhaps more objective point of view).

Giorgio Pangaro