Personal portrait of Giorgio Levi

Giorgio Levi has two great fortunes: he has a noble smile and he survived a heart attack. These are the important facts about his personality, and they are so evident that there is no need for this modest portrait, which does little more than stating the obvious. I should perhaps start by sketching my relation with Giorgio, so that my point of view is clear: I owe my life to him. In 1991, he gave me a PhD position, at a point where I was despising myself and what I had studied before. Of course, a PhD could have been the coup de grâce, but it turned out to be what I needed to get back to life and to a more balanced judgement. Giorgio wanted to advise me just after being in a talk I gave, without knowing me before, and without me asking him for a PhD. He must have guessed. The PhD affair between Giorgio and me had as much to do with personal relationship as with science and research. At the end of my studies, I left Pisa, and I never went back to Italian academia. However, Giorgio and I have had frequent personal and professional contacts ever since. I think that my detachment from Italian academia makes for a dispassionate portrait, as much as it can be about somebody who saved my life. The first thing that everybody notices is that Giorgio talks and talks fast, all the time. This is an unmistakable mark of people from the northeast of Italy, where Giorgio was born. They are the descendants of the Venice merchants, who used to trade with all the civilisations and built wonderful cities in their homeland. Giorgio has inherited their curiosity and charm, and their passion for the sea. When he swims, Giorgio’s urge to talk stops. He swims slowly in all the seas of the world, for hours at a time, often with others, sometimes in friendly challenges, around rocks and islands, silently. I think that he is listening to the sea, maybe as he would listen to his mother. I never met her, but I saw the hand-knitted sweaters she made for him, and that he reverently wears. I imagine that when Giorgio was with her, at her house in front of the sea in Varigotti, he would listen. Giorgio grew up among many women, and maybe this is why he is so good at speaking with his eyes and with his smile. He knows all the ways of subliminal communication. On the other hand, I have the impression that, despite his immediate empathy with everybody, he does not have many close friends, especially among colleagues. He seems to enjoy the natural solitude of the kings for his most private feelings. For sure, Giorgio is potently seductive, so maybe this is his way to defend himself from the adoring crowds. In the mid 1980s, Giorgio had his heart attack, and he had to have a difficult multi-bypass operation in Texas, something that only a few surgeons in the world would perform. Maybe because of that, he has a sense of urgency in his expression, something that says hurry, there’s little time. He does not wait until tomorrow, and is justified in living more freely than he would otherwise. So many times he told me that he would likely not be alive the next year. But Giorgio’s body is not failing him: quite the contrary. With the excuse of having little time, Giorgio does not save his energies, and he does not miss opportunities.