Greece owes a lot to the modern Greek philologist Mario Vittiwho passed away last night at the age of 97. He was a pioneer and driving excavator within the Hellenic Secretariat, offering an insightful and productive outlook, defining from the outset the field of understanding and navigation in Greek letters. He was a charismatic personality, charming, humorous and self-deprecating, with an attractive wisdom, digested by time, a writer and himself the bearer of a cosmopolitanism now buried in the relics of the last century.

Viti created intersections in the way Greek literature is read, and perhaps one of his most influential works, published in the 70s, The Generation of the 30s, Ideology and Form, has remained a classic. As well as the “History of Modern Greek Literature”, which is invariably a reference work.

But, of course, Viti spread over the vast territory of the Greek secretariat. He was not limited to the 20th century, he wanted to understand the threads of the Greek spirit in the historical and geocultural continuum, to trace the chords of the folk and emerging life of Greek communalism, as well as the ripples of speech and urban spirituality through the cohesive and separatist vibrations of the new Greek society from the 19th century to recent years. An approach to trends and movements as well as individuals and individual trajectories. He discovered and brought up, in fact, the forgotten and little-studied forms of the broader Hellenism, the Ionian Islands, the Balkan hinterland, Venice, on a time axis that fluctuated already from the 17th century and the first ferments of Modern Greek grammar.

Mario Viti, perhaps unwittingly, has had a profound and impressive impact on how we Greeks perceive our footprint in the European space. He himself became acquainted with the Greek way not only through the studies of philology, which he did in Rome. He knew the complex and seductive life of the “new Rome”, as he experienced it in his childhood and youth in Constantinople. Fortunately, he bequeathed his memoirs to us in his autobiography “The city where I was born. Istanbul 1926-1946, ed. Gavrielidis, 2013. Viti was the Italian of the city, a quality deeply rooted in Eastern Mediterranean culture.

He was a multifaceted person, firm and mobile, an exponent of the original Mediterranean spirit.

Perhaps this was the generative reason for him to build an active dialogue of underground currents in which the various manifestations of Hellenism converged as young scientists. In Italy, he published the Greek texts he discovered, such as Eugenia (Venice, 1646) by Theodore Monzelese, a dialogue by Nikolaos Sophianos (1966), a collection of texts by Andreas Calvos (1960). He first introduced the poetry of Odysseus Elytis to Italy and later published a collection of his poems and prose texts (1982).

He had an insatiable intellectual curiosity and a will to be creative. Approaching his work and his personality, it is impossible not to mention his photographs. As Vitya’s photographer, Euripides Garandoudis, said, “inspired so much confidence in the Greek and Italian writers he knew”, resulting in “one of the finest collections of photographs of Greek and Italian writers”.

His studies of Kalvos, Seferis, Elytis, Ritsos were subtle indentations that he made while mastering the corpus of Greek grammar. He was a multifaceted person, firm and mobile, an exponent of the original Mediterranean spirit.

His family was with him to the end. His beloved 70-year-old wife Alexandra recently passed away. His funeral will take place in Rome, in a close family circle, at his request. His two sons, Massimo and Paolo, and five grandchildren were firmly on his side.