VITA SI IMPARA

Having reached the threshold of ninety years of age, after having fascinated his readers with the secrets of history, music and religion, Corrado Augias recounts the adventure of a lifetime, his own. And with great talent as a narrator, he evokes his childhood in Libya, his return to Rome, the nightmare of the German occupation, the Catholic boarding school, his first steps in journalism, and then "Telefono giallo" and "la Repubblica". It is a story that has the warmth and empathy of a conversation between friends: life is learned, Augias tells us - especially if you never lose your intellectual curiosity and civil passion. At almost ninety, Corrado Augias is a precious witness to change. Today's Italy - excluding the eternal national vices - bears little resemblance to that of yesterday. Augias tells us about his childhood spent in Libya following his father, an officer in the Royal Air Force; the war and the bombings; the nightmare of a ferocious and gloomy occupation; the years in a Catholic college, for him who today confesses to being an atheist. And then his professional life, journalism, books, the fortunate circumstances that made him part of three important events in the cultural life of the country: the birth of the Central Directorate of Cultural Programs of the Rai; the foundation of the newspaper «la Repubblica» in 1976, the relaunch of RaiTre in 1987. The invention of some successful television programs from «Telefono giallo» to «Babele», from «Città segrete» to the most recent creation «La gioia della musica», the last program created for the Rai before the move to La7 once again with a successful culture program: «La Torre di Babele». Events that are however only the public part of a journey that has an even more interesting intimate component: the long apprenticeship to a mature dimension of intellectual. Alongside the events that have marked his life, Augias places the readings that have nourished him and from which he has «learned to live». From Titus Lucretius Carus to Renan, from Feuerbach to Freud and then Spinoza, Manzoni, Beethoven, Nietzsche, Leopardi, his teachers are thinkers, poets, narrators, musicians: a broad constellation that he does not hesitate to call his pantheon, figures who have enriched his professional path and, at the same time, his awareness as a citizen.