June 10 () –
The Italian academic Nuccio Urdine, one of the greatest experts on the Renaissance era, has died this Saturday at the age of 64 at the Cosenza Hospital, in southern Italy, where he was admitted in serious condition to the care unit. intensive due to illness.
He was one of the greatest scholars of the Renaissance period and of the scientist Giordano Bruno and last May he was awarded the 2023 Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities. The jury highlighted “his defense of the humanities and his commitment to education and values rooted in the most universal European thought”.
He also valued his effort to “transmit, especially to the youngest, that the importance of knowledge lies in the learning process itself.”
Nuccio Ordine was born on July 18, 1958 in the Calabrian town of Diamante (Italy). In 1982 he graduated in Modern Literature from the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Calabria and in 1987 he received his doctorate in Literary Sciences: Rhetoric and Techniques of Interpretation. He began his career as a journalist, in which he achieved some fame in his investigations of the Muto mafia clan.
He was a professor of Italian Literature in the Department of Humanistic Studies at the university of his native Calabria and has been visiting professor at American universities such as Harvard, Yale and New York, and European universities such as the School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences and the Normal School. University of Paris, in addition to the Warburg Institute in London, the Max Planck Society (Prince of Asturias Award for International Cooperation 2013) in Berlin and the German University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt.
Philosopher, writer and expert in literary theory, he is recognized worldwide as one of the greatest connoisseurs of Renaissance thought and literature, and, specifically, of the figure of the Neapolitan humanist Giordano Bruno. One of his outstanding books on this matter is ‘La cabala dell’asino. Asinità e conoscenza in Giordano Bruno’ (1987).
ESSAYIST
He is the author of numerous essays on the cinquecento, and in the field of literary theory and aesthetics, published in individual and collective works and in numerous articles. In his books ‘L’utilità dell’inutile: Manifesto’ (‘The utility of the useless: Manifesto’, 2013), and ‘Classici per la vita: Una piccola biblioteca ideale’ (‘Classics for life. An ideal small library ‘, 2016), works with which he reflects on the marginal situation of the humanities in today’s world and vindicates them as necessary disciplines in the civic formation of the human being and in the creation of fundamental critical thinking for development and social well-being. .
A staunch defender of an education far from the tendency to pragmatism, he advocates instilling in students the pleasure of knowledge and the curiosity for knowledge. According to his vision, a broad base of general culture will be the best tool for young people to be able to successfully face the variables of the labor market in the future.
He delves into this line in his work ‘Gli uomini non sono isole. I classici ci aiutano a vivere ‘(2018) (‘Men are not islands. The classics help us live’, 2022), in which she offers a proposal of essential books of world literature.
He is an honorary member of the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a member of the Royal Academy of Belgium and a founding member of the Italian Association for Theory and Comparative History of Literature. In addition, he chairs the Centro Internazionale di Studi Telesiani, Bruniani e Campanelliani (Cosenza, Italy) and sits on the executive council of the Italian Institute of Philosophical Studies.
He has been an advisor to the publications ‘Albertiana’ and ‘Journal de la Renaissance’, and co-directed the Giordano Bruno and Biblioteca Italiana collections for the Les Belles Lettres publishing house in Paris, and Sileni, Theatrum Sapientiae and Umbrae idearum for various publishers in his country, in addition to other collections in different countries, such as Russia, Romania or Brazil.
He was a regular contributor to the newspaper ‘Corriere della Sera’. In addition to those mentioned, in 2022 his book ‘Three crowns for a king: The Company of Enrique III and his mysteries’ was published in Spanish. Doctor honoris causa from the Brazilian universities of Rio Grande do Sul, Caixas del Sur and Porto Alegre, the University of Valparaíso (Chile), the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium), the Pontifical University of Comillas (Spain) and Seal of the Ateneo de the University of Urbino (Italy), is Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (2018), Knight and Commander of the Order of the Academic Palms (2009 and 2014) and Knight of the Order of the Legion of Honor of France (2012).
He has received the Siracusa Philosophy Prize (Italy, 2007), the Il Sogno di Piero Prize from the Urbino Academy of Fine Arts (2015), the Liberpress Prize for Literature (Gerona, Spain, 2019), the Special Prize from the Carical Foundation (Italy, 2020) and the International Prize for Humanism and Renaissance of the Egyptian Lyceum Museum (León, Spain, 2021), among many others.
