6	PLATEAU ROSA

My great master in university was Luigi Pareyson. Maestro and lifelong friend.

In my university years, I didn’t yet know what to think. I dallied with the Thomism of Caramello and with Pareyson’s philosophy, and like many left-wing Catholics at that time I read Emmanuel Mounier and Jacques Maritain, looking for a way out of the jaws of the trap formed by liberal capitalism and the bureaucratized communism of the Soviet Union. In short, I didn’t want to be identified either as a liberal or a Marxist. And—like Maritain—I was especially interested in criticizing the dogmas of modernity.

At age twenty-three, in 1959, I took my bachelor’s degree with a thesis on the “concept of doing in Aristotle.” Two years later it was published, revised and corrected.

I went for a talk with my master Pareyson, and I told him, “I’d like to study Adorno.” I had read the Minima Moralia, and to be honest, had understood about ten percent of it. Pareyson replied, “Forget Adorno, read something more up to date, study Nietzsche.”

Okay, I’ll study Friedrich Nietzsche.

The summer after my degree I went to the mountains alone—another great passion of mine, running through my whole existence—to a shelter three thousand meters up, above Cervinia, at Colle del Theodulo, near Plateau Rosa, bringing with me the French translation of Nietzsche’s Unfashionable Observations, especially the essay entitled “On the Utility and Liability of History for Life,” meaning historical studies, historiography.

I would ski in the morning, then eat lunch and chat with a cornetist from the Vienna Opera who was also staying at the shelter, and then study Nietzsche.

An epic summer! I discovered Nietzsche’s critique of historicism, his reflections against modernity, and this image of his that remained fundamental for me: modern man is wandering around in history as if it were a theme park or a storehouse of theatrical masks, trying on this one and that one.

The previous December I had read the Letter on Humanism that Martin Heidegger wrote “against” Sartre. An illumination, a real conversion experience. The most important turn—or rather twofold turn, together with the discovery of Nietzsche—of my speculative experience. There’s no doubt that for me it all begins there.

Heidegger writes: we are not on a plane where there is mankind alone, but on which there is above all and principally Being.

This business about Being intrigued me, because it seemed to be receptive to my religious heritage, and more than that, I saw in it a philosophical (and existential and political) prospect of liberty, of liberation. Not with stark clarity at first, but that was certainly what drew me.

So what happens? Just while I am studying Nietzsche, out come two big volumes on Nietzsche by Heidegger. Naturally I can’t go further into Nietzsche without knowing what Heidegger has to say.

So I plunge into Heidegger. And that was it, the second great erotico-philosophical adventure of my life.

I read him in German, Heidegger, taking systematic notes on small green sheets of paper from the Banco San Paolo. You know, recycled paper. I’ve always been a fanatic about reusing paper.

Those little green pages with my notes, I still have them today.