11	ON THE BANKS OF THE NECKAR

I haven’t yet told you why and in what sense and in what way I was a Catholic, from age twelve to age twenty-four or twenty-five. But I know that I stopped being one when I no longer read the Italian newspapers. My religious commitment was so much interwoven with my philosophical and political commitment that, when I lost contact with Italian politics, boom, it was all over, painlessly, just like it began. Even if a lot of passion was consumed in the interval.

After graduating, I won the prestigious Humboldt Fellowship for two consecutive years. So I went to live in Germany for months at a time, in Heidelberg. Eight hundred marks amounted to a rich postdoctoral fellowship at that period.

I lived in a room on the top floor of a small house near the city’s old bridge, with a terrace overlooking the Neckar River.

I traveled back to Turin once a month, but that’s all. And La Stampa was two days old by the time it reached Heidelberg. . . . After having spent years and years getting up at dawn to go to mass—before school, before the office, before university lectures—I continued going on Sunday for a while in the church of the Holy Spirit, near the university, and then I just stopped.

Heidelberg was another great intellectual adventure. It was there that I really began to work out my philosophy.

At Heidelberg I attended the lectures of the great philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer, Heidegger’s student, whom I later translated and made better known in Italy. Habermas’s pronunciation I couldn’t understand, but Gadamer I could follow; he spoke a particularly clear brand of German, at any rate in the lectures he gave for his “formal” course. I had more trouble following him when he was speaking to the handful of members of his “reserved seminar,” and afterward when we used to go with him in winter to an old tavern to eat goulash and black bread and drink wine, and to his house in the hills in summer.

So I was frequenting Gadamer, the other lectures very little, and the library a lot, where I could read texts I wouldn’t have found in Italy. I worked on my Heidegger book. Most evenings I stayed in, supping on bread, butter, and salami and trying to smoke a pipe, because I remembered the ease with which Umberto Eco used to handle his pipe when we lived together in Milan.

Although a decent knowledge of languages has helped me along in life, I confess that vis-à-vis Gadamer I felt like a worm. As far as I could tell, the only one who understood less than me was a beautiful prince from some African tribe, whom I tried to seduce. Unsuccessfully, because of the language barrier. The other students all seemed to me exceedingly clever, and perhaps they were—today they all hold chairs in Germany with major academic careers behind them.

Gadamer was my other great maestro, along with Pareyson. And a friend, though an ironic one who always managed to keep his distance.

I have to admit that the second year I went to Heidelberg mostly to pick up my stipend. Then I would return to Italy and use the money to live on as Pareyson’s assistant. But when Gadamer began his course I showed up respectfully to greet him, and he said, “Oh, are you still here?” with that slightly mocking air of his.

Years later I was asked to give a course at the University of Louvain, the same course Gadamer had given, and the first thing I did was ring him up. And he—the great narcissist—pointed out to me that it wasn’t the same university, because in the meantime they had split it between Leuven in Flanders (the A-list university where he had taught) and Louvain-la-Neuve in Wallonia (the B-list university where I was going to teach).

Later, though, I was his first translator into a language other than German (something Paul Ricoeur acknowledges, mentioning me in his French translation), and I spent many a summer afternoon at his house discussing my queries about the translation.

I finished Verità e metodo, my translation of Wahrheit und Methode, in 1969, five hundred pages of wonderful training for me. I returned to Heidelberg, and this time Gianpiero, whom I had met the year before, came with me. I spent many hours with Gadamer and “assimilated” him as a person too.

Whenever he came to Italy he always rang me up.

I was one of the three philosophers asked to deliver a speech in his honor on his hundredth birthday. It was 2000, and Gadamer had two more years to live. At the end of the ceremony, I remember, he drank a whole bottle of Calvados. To him—with his combination of distance and affection, snobbishness and great generosity and intellectual honesty, all of which I find in his letters, which are full of punctual and respectful observations—I owe one of the strongest emotions of my life as a philosopher. It was Gadamer, the great Gadamer, who, when he was listening to me during an international conference, said to the person beside him, “That’s a real philosophical discourse.” Oh, man. . . .

When I got back from Heidelberg I bought my first car. A Fiat 600, naturally. The color of goose shit. Naturally.