With a lot of care: Severino Cesari

I remember a great intellectual, a man of immense culture and a true friend: Severino Cesari, and in these days is about to be released the book "Con molta cura" (With a lot of care).

For once I’m not going to talk about wine or chefs but about a friend who is no longer with us. His name was Severino Cesari and I met him in 1986b when Gambero Rosso was getting off the ground and Stefano Bonelli brought me into the project that began at the offices of the Il Manifesto newspaper. At the time, Severino was a contributing editor for their cultural section and was both a friend and protégé of Rossana Rossandra. He was a young man then, one with a boundless and ‘light’ culture and Stefano got him involved in the fledging Gambero Rosso project to which he contributed deliciously elegant articles.

Often they were reportages of dinners we had with leading Italian cultural figures, from Natalia Ginzburg to Giulio Einaudi, from Renato Nicolini to Elvira Sellerino, from Vittorio Foa to Enrico Ghezzi. Years later he acted as my ‘mentor’ when I wrote two books for the Einaudi Stile Libero series, which he had created along with Paolo Repetti. The books were “Memories of a Wine Taster” and “The Tales (and Advice) of Doctor Wine” and if you liked them then some of the credit goes to Severino who corrected by style and played a key role making sure I finished them. All things considered he was a true friend and an extraordinary person. The last years of his life were an authentic ordeal. First he suffered from kidney disease that resulted in a transplant and then he developed cancer, which slowly and inevitably took him away. 

However, in 2015, he began to chronicle this final stage of his life on his Facebook page and it was followed thousands of readers, including total strangers, who participated and encouraged him in thousands of ways. And he did all this with the lightness of being and irony that had always distinguished him as well as extraordinary courage without any self-pity. All his writing from this period have now been put together in a book that has just been published by Rizzoli entitled “With great Care” (Con Molta Cura).

It is an authentic work of literature, a heart rendering testament and for me every line brings back his voice and his suave way of laughing. Severino was only 66 when he died and up until the end I hoped he would defeat his disease. Unfortunately, this did not happen but he did have the time to tell us about it and we now have the time to read it and remember him.