Nuccio Ordine, professor, philosopher and one of the greatest connoisseurs of the Renaissance, has passed away today at the age of 64. The thinker, who had just been awarded the Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities, felt unwell last Sunday, was admitted to the emergency room and died today, according to what the Italian press has published.
Born in Diamante (Calabria) in July 1958, Ordine was also an expert in the thought and work of Giordano Bruno and worked as a professor of Italian Literature at the University of Calabria in Cosenza (Italy). He recently promoted, together with Yves Hersant and Alain Segonds, three collections of classics, for the publishing house Les Belles Lettres. He wrote for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.
Ordine had put all his effort into conveying the idea that money does not bring happiness, defender of culture, classicism and studies as a source of pleasure, the philosopher had just finished a trilogy made up of The Uselessness of the Useless, Clásicos para la vida and Los hombres no son islas, with which he wanted to “make people understand that the classics are not studied to get a degree or pass an exam, but because they help us live”, as he explained in a recent interview with La Vanguardia.
His access to that culture that he defended tooth and nail was not easy, because in the town of Ordine there was neither a school nor a bookstore. But that was not a barrier for the future scholar who learned to read thanks to the comics his grandfather sold at the Diamante kiosk and the efforts of the local teacher who rented a room in her house to turn it into a kind of makeshift school.
Ordine, who was aware of the fortune he had when learning, continued studying, reading and writing, but above all, teaching to convey to his students that knowledge is the true source of happiness: “the first classes are very hard, you You feel almost like a lion tamer jumping onto the ring, but when you have read a page that makes the hearts and souls of young people vibrate, they follow you,” he said.
Over time, Ordine became one of the leading specialists in the Renaissance and the foremost connoisseur of the life and work of Giordano Bruno, the 16th-century astrologer, philosopher, poet, and mathematician who discovered that the sun was a simple star and who was burned at the stake after being accused of heresy. Bruno was a Renaissance man who cultivated various areas of knowledge and that was the example that Ordine wanted to instill in his students: “The best physicists are those who have also studied Greek and Latin and have had a humanistic training.”
Among his best-known works are El umbral de la sombra (Siruela, 2008), Clásicos para la vida. A small ideal library (Cliff, 2017) or Men are not islands. The classics help us live (Cliff, 2002). Works in which Ordine defended the value of classical literature because reading “is a way of traveling with thought, a way of living more lives”: “A classic makes us understand key aspects of the present, teaches us to be free and happy , that is why in the protests in China they carried fragments of Dante’s Comedy â€.
