Nuccio Ordine, thinker, writer and essayist died in Cosenza (Calabria) this Saturday. Extraordinary intellectual and popularizer, he had a great influence on the Spanish publishing sector and a great ascendancy among European readers. No one is ever prepared for such news. But in the case of Ordine, even less. The writer, who had to be admitted urgently to the Annuziata hospital in Cosenza, where he went a few days ago after a stroke, was due to collect the 2023 Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities in October. An appointment that I awaited with great emotion.
More informationNuccio Ordine: praise of "lost time" and attack on "commercial education"
Nuccio Ordine (Diamante, 1958 – Cosenza, 2023) was one of those authors who often enjoy more prestige outside than in their own home. In fact, in Spain it acquired in recent years a great relevance and sold more than 80,000 books in Spanish. The author of The Uselessness of the Useless, a worldwide success – it is in its 28th edition in its Spanish version – in which he denounced the damage that current utilitarianism causes in school, university or research, continued to work in Italy as a professor of Italian Literature at the University of Calabria. A renowned specialist in the Renaissance in general and Giordano Bruno in particular, his books have been translated into 24 languages. An anomaly considering its origins.
Ordine was born in a small Calabrian village without a bookstore and always said that she learned to read thanks to television, the comics her grandfather sold in a kiosk and a good teacher. "Being born in a house without books and parents who did not study, living in a small southern city without bookstores or libraries, without theaters or cultural spaces, does not mean being condemned to ignorance," he explained in an interview. Visiting professor at centers such as Yale, Paris IV-Sorbonne, the CESR in Tours, the IEA in Paris, the Warburg Institute or the Max Planck in Berlin, Ordine was also a member of the Harvard University Center for for Italian Renaissance Studies, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Ordine lived in the countryside, in Cosenza (Calabria), surrounded by a library of more than 20,000 books. After starting teaching in southern Italy, he went to the University, where he has developed his tireless research work, which has led him to share and publish texts ranging from the proposal of specific models of philosophical exegesis to others of wide diffusion. So much so, that this year he received one of the highest possible recognitions.
The news of his death was confirmed by the mayor of Consenza, Franz Caruso, who expressed his sadness at the disappearance of "one of the most cultured figures, in the broadest sense of the term, that Calabria and the whole country have been able to include in their recent history."
Nuccio Ordine in Milan in July 2014.Leonardo Cendamo (Getty Images)
Ordine was electedPrincess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities 2023. "I feel very, very happy and very moved, I can measure the size of this award and I can assure you that it is far superior to me," he told this newspaper during a brief telephone conversation when the award was awarded. The jury has recognized Ordine "for his defense of the Humanities and his commitment to education and values rooted in the most universal European thought", and has highlighted him for establishing "a dialogue with contemporary society to transmit, especially to the youngest, that the importance of knowledge is found in the very process of learning". "The usefulness of education must be understood in terms of passion for the pursuit of knowledge and the best of each person, without being limited to an economic interest," continued the jury. Because that, precisely, was one of the pillars of his work.
The shortcomings, gaps and perversions of educational systems, as Borja Hermoso recalled in this newspaper a few days ago, have been one of Ordine's favorite victims in books such as the aforementioned The usefulness of the useless, but also in Classics for life or Men are not islands, all of them published in Spanish by Acantilado, to which the thinker, writer and professor of Italian Literature at the University of Calabria has thanked "from the heart" for his work in all these years. "Today, those people who dedicate their lives to teaching are considered obsolete, but I dedicate this award to them, I dedicate it to those who teach and silently change, with their sacrifice, the lives of their students," said the Italian intellectual.
You had to go to the greats and the past, to understand any minutiae of the present. And he left it written in Classics for Life. A small ideal library (2017), where he claimed masters such as Cervantes, Shakespeare and Plato to understand current issues, from the inequality of women to independence. "I would recommend Puigdemont and Rajoy to read Montesquieu," the author said in a 2017 interview with Efe. Ordine now passes to the other side of the barrier, that of recommended classics.
The Princess of Asturias Foundation: "A man committed to education and the defence of the humanities"
Teresa Sanjurjo, director of the Princess of Asturias Foundation, said this Saturday afternoon after learning of Ordine's death: "We have been waiting for many days for the state of health of Nuccio Ordine and we have learned with great sadness that he has just passed away. We share with our hearts the pain of his family and friends and we will always remember the immense joy and honour that the Princess of Asturias Award meant for him for his commitment to education and his fierce defence of the humanities as a way to transmit knowledge to new generations. We will be a speaker of his invaluable message and pass on his legacy."