WELCOME
This is my website where I share my passion for building a better world together through positive actions,
encounters with people, inspiring books and what we learn day by day. Follow me and join the debate to achieve this goal.
Living a good life
Life is a journey, an adventure. As such, it must be lived if you want to be at peace with yourself and if you want to seize the opportunities it
offers (or life’s “fortune” to use the word preferred by our great Machiavelli). There is a well-known quote from John Lennon, who said: "Life is what happens while you’re making other plans." It
is such an effective definition of life that I have always liked to share it, along with the phrase "life is everything you never expect”. Some definitions of
life embody a certain pessimism. Think of the vision of life portrayed by Giovanni Verga in "I Malavoglia" (The House by the Medlar-Tree), whose protagonists are destroyed by Fate and Nature in
their desire to get rich and to climb the social ladder at any cost. But if we take Hermann Hesse’s "Siddhartha" as our symbol, we see that we start to live when we are freed from professional
roles, public recognition and our needs; when "being" triumphs over "having". Life is like a river that flows on inexorably, carrying everyone along equally. So what happens to me today may
happen to you tomorrow, because we are all on the banks of the river of life, and although it is true that we can shape our destiny, there are always unpredictable elements caused by others, by
the very environment that surrounds this “river”. In the ever indeterminate determinism of life, there is also Nash’s famous game theory which shows
that, under many conditions, there is an equilibrium that results when each individual involved in a given game (such as life) chooses their strategy to maximize their pay-offs in the
belief that their “rivals’” behavior will not change because of their choice. So you win and lose, and everything depends on your personal state and that of your opponent at any given moment.
Life is a game, so we have to play with determination, with energy, but also with a philosophical attitude, because there will always be someone who wins at any particular moment and that cannot
always be us, especially if the game is rigged, which is unfortunately often the case, as we see in Italy today. Happily, we can overcome, if we follow
Gramsci’s dictum: "the pessimism of reason and optimism of the will", which means to live your life wisely and above all to have the wisdom of life that comes from a taste for simplicity, for
essential things, for things that are useful and ethical, and for the aesthetically beautiful. So to live well, we must have a deep knowledge of
everything that life may reserve for us, of all possible worlds, in order to understand the things that happen to us and to be able to make the best choices taking into account all the
independent variables that life presents. This deep knowledge comes from reading the great works of philosophy, literature, poetry, theatre, economics and sociology. And by visiting the
places and museums where we find the beauty and wealth of artworks and landscapes, educating our taste for the beautiful, the useful and the good. To
lead a serene life, guided by the great values shared by all humanity, ethics and aesthetics should be the guidelines of our journey on this Earth, despite all the uncertainties that life holds
for us. This way of conceiving our being and our actions should be adopted particularly by those who work in our public institutions, whose aims should always the pursuit of the common good with
maximum economic effectiveness while ensuring the lowest possible social cost. But this is not always easy, because often these people do not have even the minimum necessary resources that can be
used as start-up in order to launch activities in the public interest for the benefit of civil society and the image of our country. Moreover, the problem is not purely a matter of financial
resources, because if you make smart projects, in the end funding will come, although not without effort. However, there is also the problem that there is always someone who wants to prevent you
taking forward new ideas. Umberto Eco expressed this magnificently in his wonderful novelThe Name of the Rose, which tells of the atavistic struggle between innovation and tradition,
between the pursuit of truth and the power that wants to obscure it (symbolised by William of Baskerville and Jorge of Burgos), between the regenerative power of laughter and the destructive
force of pain. Finally, my life, both private and professionally has always been a quest to aspire to certain values which I see as fundamental and for
which life is truly worth living: the common good; social well-being; the happiness of every individual and of society as a whole; integrity in interpersonal
relations and respect for good rules; harmony, peace and serenity. As Dante rightly tells us in his famous triplet "... we were not made to live like brutes but to follow virtue and
knowledge." This is the essence of what I have tried to do, humbly, in serving Italy and Europe over the course of my professional career.
Extract from an interview, December the 27th 2012
