Remembering Goffredo Fofi

Goffredo Fofi has passed away at the age of eighty-eight. His name may not mean much to those who follow Italian culture from abroad, yet he was the most important intellectual in our country in the last sixty years. This is not the place to recall in detail the many aspects of his multifaceted career, from his social, civil and political commitment to his investment in education, from literature to cinema. Here, we would simply like to highlight a fundamental trait of his personality that left its mark on each of the many initiatives that characterised his intellectual journey: his generosity. In a cultural context inevitably dominated by the desire for personal affirmation and protagonism, Goffredo Fofi embraced a “spirit of service” in all his work. This spirit of service found its main means of expression in the collective and pluralistic dimension of cultural reviews: From Ombre rosse to Quaderni Piacentini, from Linea d’ombra to Lo Straniero and Gli Asini, the major Italian cultural reviews from the second half of the twentieth century to the present day have been the terrain on which Fofi has carried out a widespread and daily exercise in ‘cultural mediation’, that has allowed the critical and creative work of many young Italian intellectuals to emerge. Never overbearing yet always rigorous and demanding, Fofi’s approach, supported by an ethical and civil engagement that combined Capitini’s pacifism with the ideals of justice and equality of Christian tradition and libertarian socialism, has been a key reference point in Italian cultural discourse for over half a century. For all those who stubbornly believed and continue to believe in another possible model of society and culture, Goffredo Fofi was (and continues to be) a yardstick for measuring the world.