It is an honour for me to interview, among other things, who made the last interview with George Steiner.Mi friendship with Mr Steiner
is a gift of life. I read when I was a student, I met as a young professor in Paris and our relationship has not ceased. A book about him will be published shortly, including the postum of the interview, with an attempt to present his thought. I define him as an awkward guest: he spent his entire life in college, but he made a very harsh critique of parasitism; he was critical, but he defended the humility, which the books deserve attention, of course, and never the critics; and, being a Jew, he defended that the nationalism of the state of Israel has nothing to do with the Hebraic culture and how a people can be tortured. He said things that people don't want to hear.

The following question is also mandatory: Come from Italy, the government has the far-right... We're seeing things that we thought were overcome. It
is happening all over the world, Prima gli italiani, America first, France d’justo, Brazil acima de tudo... It's a similar idea, a pathological nationalism, because it's thought we can live indoors in a territory. It's crazy, a miserable way to present the world and humanity. John Donn already said that the island view of the human being is very dangerous, a selfish being, who only thinks about himself, who believes that life in general can be unique. For me, humanity is something else, Seneka said that your life makes sense with the things you can do for others. It's a wonderful formula: humanity would be an interlaced brick dome, and if a brick falls, they all fall. Human solidarity is the fundamental idea.

Against this would be the over-elevation of identity.
This is the myth of the Theseus boat. After the death of the minotaur, they leave it in the Athenian port, symbol of victory, but at the age of 50 they break the wood, arrange it with the new wood... Is it still the ship of Theseus?

That is, identity is never stable, it is always dynamic, the confusion between the old and the new. The idea of uncontaminated identity, as defended by the people on the right, is very dangerous. We should not mention what Hitler did for the purity of the Aryan race. What is the Aryan race? I'm a puppy, Latino, Greek, Arabic, and I'm very proud of that abundance. The idea of radical identity can generate racism and xenophobia. I believe, on the contrary, that in a world where there is religious, cultural, linguistic plurality, that world will be exciting. I find a world that can have a religion, a culture, a single language frightening.

Furthermore, we have been forgotten where that mono-Roman vision of the world has led us. A lot of things mix: a bleaching of history, a banalization, a kind of Adanism ... I mean, the lack of knowledge of history.
Today, history and memory are despised, two very important things. We live in a very technological society in which what is worth is the future, not the present, which is already obsolete, and all of the above, is worth nothing. I think memory has a very important role, and that history shows things -- even though man repeats the same mistakes -- without memory, without history, you can't understand anything.

When I see educational programs, School 4.0, etc., I get upset: What does it mean that School 3.0 is useless? The Iphone 13 makes you think that the previous twelve Iphone are not worth, which have become obsolete, is an idea of programmed obsolescence. Why is this not good for the new? It is no coincidence that in the Greek world memory is the mother of all knowledge, that new knowledge is children of memory. Today we have no interest in history, because we are a world programmed to make money, we look only at the future, at the end product of technology. The impulse for consumption is enormous and young people are programmed consumers, in school, in university... We do not educate educated and critical citizens, we generate passive consumers, little solders who think only about making money and who prioritize success.

How do literature and classics stand in that world? Or, asking about Italo Calvino, why read the classics today?
Although written in the past, classics are always our contemporaries. This premise is valid for all times. The question is what questions we ask the classics and if we read them today in school, in university. It's the criticism I make: young people know the classics, but the summaries that manuals do. They don't read directly. There is a big difference between reading a summary of the Quijote or a page of the Quijote. How can a student love Quijote if he reads a summary? It's a cold, meaningless thing. Only by reading directly, with a proper teacher, you will understand that he has current messages: for example, although today one thinks that the first person to come is the only one that is worth – even if you do ethically diffuse things – said Giordano Bruno: “What really matters in life is not to arrive first, but to do it with dignity.”

As in that Kavafis poem, the important thing is the journey rather than the goal.
Kavafis interprets the myth of Ulysses in an excellent way, as the important thing is not to reach Itaca, but the experience of what is gathered along the way. The most beautiful thing in life is not the goal, the goal can be a stimulus, but it matters the experience, the effort, the complexity of the things we do to reach the goal. To my students, I talk about those things, what is a student's real goal? It can be a miserable paper diploma that allows you to earn money, but that would be the result of something else much more important. To be better, you’ll need to acquire a critical sense to understand and analyze the world around you in an original, intelligent and autonomous way.

The parties on the right succeed because there is a great lack of knowledge in our societies. And the Internet is presented as a huge opportunity, it's true. It allows me to read thousands of Renaissance texts from my home in Calabria, but the Internet is made for people who know a little and not for those who don't know anything. One thing is to use technology, and another is to use it, because technology steals life, because it's a kind of big brother stealing your ideas, your intimacy, and then selling it to companies through algorithms. And what kind of world is the most important if they are “sold” and “bought”?

It seems contradictory that, in a world in which classics seem to lack space, books like yours, dedicated to classics, have accumulated such success. How can we explain this success?
Honestly, I would never have imagined it. I have written the alarm as a call, as a gesture of protest, against the market perspective of education, which today is destroying school and university. But I have to say that I've found people who share my ideas, I get letters from students and teachers all over the world. It gives me a lot of pleasure because there is resistance to that trend. Maybe half a million readers are nothing compared to the millions who think it's best to make money, but they make me understand it's worth fighting. It's a glorious failure, if you will, to the extent that I do what my thought and my ethics demand of me, a success. I'm a professor, I can't teach differently than I teach, and that would be the real failure. Every time I speak, I get the feeling that there are people listening to me, people who think this struggle is true.

You've talked in the books about the importance of education to educate autonomous and critical citizens. Remember the letter that Albert Camus wrote in gratitude to his professor.
Teaching is not a profession for me, it is a vocation. I'm often asked by the teachers, what's the secret to teaching. Today we have many courses for teachers and there are many pedagogues that say a lot of nonsense. They believe that to be a good teacher you need a theoretical knowledge of the teaching method, a universal method, and it is not true. The first thing is to know the discipline: if you have to teach literature and do not know literature, it will not work. Second thing: loving the things you teach; if you don't want them, you can't convey that love. Believe me: I've been teaching for over 30 years, and the students perceive it clearly. Money is invested in buying computers, digital boards, internet... But if you don't have good teachers, it's in vain. Here's Camus's letter: only good teachers can change the lives of students.

His manifested book, The Value of the Useless (Pamiela), will be published soon in Basque.
Yes, and I give it a lot of courage. Small languages, like big ones, are very important because every language is a window to understand the world; and when a language dies, that window closes. I am very proud that this book is in Basque. I don't care about the economic part, how much it's going to sell: the Basque translation, like the Galician translation, makes me feel proud because there are people who have chosen my book, saying to people: “This book is important to our culture.” For me, it's more valuable than commercial success.