California Italian Studies

Conversation is a term of which Gianni Vattimo was particularly fond. Santiago Zabala, ICREA Research Professor at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and one of his former students and collaborators, put it at the center of his obituary of the Italian philosopher in the Los Angeles Review of Books published on September 19, 2023, the day of Vattimo’s death at age 87. It was part of Vattimo’s particular way of thinking philosophy and the exchange of ideas, and it is very significant that this editorial project, The Vattimo Dictionary, began with a series of conversations with Santiago Zabala in various locations, both physical and virtual. One of these locations was the Vattimo Archive, hosted at the Pompeu Fabra University, of which Zabala is the supervisor, inaugurated in 2016 after Vattimo donated his papers, manuscripts, course materials, letters, notes, and photographic material to the Catalan institution. The first international presentation of this volume took place there on November 7, 2023, in the context of a commemoration of the philosopher. The archive certainly played an important role in identifying the key terms for the Dictionary, as well as in gaining access to published and unpublished material that proved essential to the task of writing the introduction. Even more so in my own case, as I could not claim a direct knowledge of the philosopher beyond his publications, contrary to many contributors to the volume, who had known Vattimo as colleagues, former students, friends, or scholars. In fact, I first met Vattimo only in 2018, at the presentation of Essere e dintorni (Being and its Surroundings) at the Circolo dei Lettori in Turin, a book that was largely the outcome of the work of collecting the archival material for Pompeu Fabra University, as Zabala himself confirmed in one of those conversations. Yet it seemed to me that I had known Vattimo more intimately for much longer, so much was he a familiar figure in the Italian cultural panorama, thanks also to his numerous television appearances in cultural programs (often directed by him), of which he was a pioneer through his work for RAI and other networks from the 1950s onward, and through his publications in newspapers and magazines. This willingness to follow different paths for the diffusion of knowledge, which until recently were considered very unorthodox and even openly snubbed by the Italian academic world, paired with his generosity in listening to various interlocutors, seems to me to be one of the most memorable and captivating traits of Gianni Vattimo, who immediately put those who spoke with him at ease—as it was the case with me on that day six years ago.