Per Carlo

So many memories and stories have been surfacing these days, crowding the minds of all those who shared years or decades of their lives with Carlin. I said lives, not professional lives, and that was deliberate: Carlo approached existence as a whole, with a worldview woven from things different and seemingly unrelated. That original, layered blend was contagious to everyone he met. The impression he left you with came precisely from the fact that it was never just about work; it was about a way of being. Because above all else, Carlo was a remarkable maker of meaning. He drew no line between work and pleasure, duty and joy, or even the public and the private. Life flowed as one continuous current: passion and reason, silence and words, sweeping vision and plain practicality, all mixed and alternating without pause. Carlo was polyphonic, counterpoint and all.

Carlo was impossible to pin down, impossible to reduce to a label or a type. He slipped past the obvious, past the predictable, and kept going. Sometimes opaque, sometimes completely open. Sometimes tender, sometimes unyielding. He anticipated and he moved forward. Ideas first, the means to realize them second. That was one of the many lessons that struck me to the core the first time I heard him say it. Ideas come before every other consideration: with the power of an idea, you can build the most beautiful cathedrals.

You'd walk into his office having thought something through carefully, maybe even prepared some sharp, critical arguments against what he was working on. He'd listen, and then within minutes he'd taken you somewhere else entirely: somewhere different from where he had started, and different from where you had intended to go. And he'd have convinced you all over again. You walked out energized, full of enthusiasm. He spoke the same way to everyone, that's true, but rarely have I seen anyone so naturally attuned to the full atmosphere that another person brought into the room, whether that person was a farmer, a politician, an artist, an entrepreneur, a chef, a producer, or an ordinary citizen.

Carlo was the most vivid expression of a craftsman's intelligence: intuitive, improvisational, imaginative, empathetic, sympathetic and creative, practical and hands-on. That's why academics and intellectuals admired him, yet he was never seduced by them. In the end, you had to work hard and commit to the project. Without emotional investment, you get nowhere. This is how I always understood his guiding principle of "austere anarchy": move with intuition, read the situation, seize the right moment without ever locking yourself into predetermined patterns (the anarchy) while always maintaining vigilance (the austerity).

Carlo was also a magician (Màgeiros, in ancient Greek, means cook: a word of uncertain etymology that evocatively echoes the words for magic and magician, pointing to a figure with many roles, among them a central ritual and sacrificial one). He loved rituals and symbols. Among the many ceremonies he led, his Choral gatherings with students stand out as unforgettable. The students gave a little of that magic back to him when, the day after his death, they came to sing beneath his window at his home in Bra.

Carlin also had the gift of being able to "sell" ice at the Arctic Circle and space heaters in the tropics, but always in service of the central idea, the ultimate purpose that came before everything else. And what was that purpose? What is it now, more than ever? A qualitative life. A good life. For Carlo, a good life meant a life rich in affection, values, conviviality, commitment, community, and a sense of justice. Food was his compass for exploring and navigating that pursuit, an endless search for a good life in every corner of the world. A few days ago, Carlo completed his first life cycle, the physical and earthly one. But he lives on, and will continue to live, alongside all of humanity, because he had, and bore witness to, a good life. A truly remarkable life.

Nicola Perullo,
Rector and Vice President