We knew each other for a long time before we finally connected through his story: young, recently married to Alexandra Perkise Hydra, he spends long periods of time on Hydra in the 1950s, which good Athens discovered and built his own private club there. He is in demand in these circles, he is Italian, maybe a professor, maybe a writer, maybe an intellectual, practically unknown to them, but there is something almost exotic about him that always puts the social elevator ahead of others. He’s in trouble, he’s looking for a way to save himself, he succeeds with a short dialogue: “You, Mr. Witty, you must have done important research”, “Oh no, not at all, I’m self-taught.” “. The invitations have stopped.

It was this Mario Vitti who became a cherished friend for the next 35 years: self-mocking, allergic to flattery, ambivalent about praise, with an organic dislike of everything petty-bourgeois, a genuine snob, a fugitive from any closed sect, playful with a goal to spoil the games of others and make your own. Educated but “self-sufficient”, and even as he traveled many miles of research, writing and twists and turns, he didn’t wear his work as existential clothing, but his existential weaving got him to work. He often referred to himself as “self-taught” and “unskilled” to the end, meaning “uncorporated” in his own language.

“I was lucky to play alone and, in any case, away from group games … For a long time, leaning my face against the window glass, I watched the children play in the street” (“The City Where I Was Born”). This glass, which will later be replaced by a photo lens, will determine the way he sees, looks, marks his territory.

Istanbul in 1926 is the former capital of a collapsed empire, but still retains all of its polyethnic and polyphonic fabric. His family is a web of diverse origins: his father’s ancestors came from Genoa to Chios, and from there to Constantinople. His mother is from Cappadocia, he was born an Italian citizen, and at home there are at least two languages ​​- Greek and Italian, as well as a third, the lingua franca of the time, French, and in high school a fourth, Turkish.

He often referred to himself as “self-taught” and “unskilled” to the end, meaning “uncorporated” in his own language.

He will choose the place himself, “if there is a country that I can consider my homeland, then this is Italy”, and this “if” indicates closeness rather than identity. He will settle in Rome, the capital of another empire, which lay in ruins for centuries, and will occupy himself with Greece, which bears the deep traces of both empires.

The journey from Rome to Istanbul with Dakota takes a long time: “four hours Rome – Athens and another four hours Athens – Istanbul.” This flight he will repeat literally and metaphorically throughout his life with a panoramic view of the Greek texts, he will bring them out of isolation, place them in History, connect them to the wider European universe and from there rework them to the end, look for end dates, adopt new ones. approaches, looking for new texts. He should not protect and support, but open. His sole citizenship, cosmopolitan, irreconcilable with mythical nationalism, privileges him with irony, a sense of relativity that is often paraphrased as coldness.

“I am a cold person…” he will say in an interview (“Kathimerini”, February 3, 2013), and in “Office with a View” he will constantly talk about passion, about passionate loves in literature, about the ecstasy of discovery, the intoxicating experience of new texts, the unacknowledged pleasure of stealing a document. It was different with people, where emotion fought with aesthetics, confession with a reservation, and subtle irony masked embarrassment and excitement, risking misunderstanding.

On August 18 last year, we celebrated his 96th birthday in Rome with his grandchildren. On the terrace, from the hill of Gianicolo, the panorama of the deserted August city became a screen on which, every night, for ten days, Mario projected the stories of his life with clarity, without wrinkles, into a de oral profundis autobiography, which, even with misty eyes, was made in the style buffoonery.

Vulnerable the first time, he gave permission to deep emotions that had the tinge of losing Alexandra. When they got married, he asked her to promise him that their marriage would be a year-long experiment. 70 years spent together were decomposed in the film into sequels, for the viewer, fragments of passions, mistakes, moments. He began the last investigation, he looked at the end, agnostic and anti-clerical, thinking about what will happen after, about what will happen after, about possible meetings, about all the mysteries that he tried to unravel, unburdened with certainty, without waiting for an answer. answers.