<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daniele Sanvitto</span>
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Daniele Sanvitto

Daniele Sanvitto is a long time friend since I met him in Sheffield, where he was one of the three things I found there: England, him and everything/everybody else. He moved to Spain for a variety of reasons—one being sun and food—and I went there for Elena, with whom he married me. We worked a bit together but he quickly moved away from this horrible Ramon y Cajal and Spanish systems, both being crushing for people who are not part of a nepotic ring of petits protégés. He went to another place with even more sun and better food than Spain, which was Lecce in beautiful Salento. We kept in touch professionally for a while but I could never bring him enough to quantum and he could never bring me enough to condensed matter so that we could keep trying doing something worthwhile, eventually. Maybe one day, we will. He has always remained a friend, though, in fact even becoming at some point the Wigner friend of a strange story, but that was in another universe. In this one, we sometimes write to each other, although he usually does the writing first and I hang on him until he gets tired and moves on, to come back a long time later complaining I'm not getting in touch. That's our dynamics. He's an ENFP so we have much tolerance for our considerable incompatibilities, probably even some affection for them. I like everything of him that usually annoys people and vice versa. And he has material to annoy: he has a very demanding personality: he's never satisfied by anything, which is typical of those Italian geniuses—the Gli irrequieti—from Galileo to Olivetti and Ferrari. Nothing is success to him, nothing is achieved, nothing is good enough. He can publish in Nature and still complains that he's not doing anything new. If you remind him of this or that paper, he will go «oh but that was a long time ago». It doesn't matter if it was three weeks or fifteen years ago. Everything in the past is something that is over, gone, forgotten. If he's not at the best of his abilities in the present moment, he's nothing. Nonetheless, the past is always lurking. Whenever I invite him to speak somewhere, he tells me «I have nothing new to say since last time, at this point it would just be repeating the same material.» He likes things for their potential, for what they could be, never for what they are. He is the son of another genius, this one an architect, who builds monuments that are rounds. Not even rounds, curvy. The rooms are curvy, the tables are curvy, the doors are curvy. When you're born in such a twisted universe from such a spectacular mind, no wonder that you become unique and different. I believe he is an extremely sensitive and empathic person, but being of such superior intellect, he knows how to keep this completely private and invisible for the rest of the world, to appear this group leader, successful scientist and goal-oriented ambitious person that he looks like to most who don't know the man behind the legend. That he is so successful despite having the profile of those who never push others or do anything to impose themselves, was only possible because of the magnitude and depth of his perception and understanding of everything. Well, I should say of "most things" as we disagree deeply on many and fundamental issues, but I'm not assuming I'm the one who is right. I really think that he's the type of people who could have become world famous but decided that it's not worth it and carried on with doing things as well and as decent as one can, uncompromising, and that it's enough or—more accurately—that it is right to be important only for those people that you know, those you can touch. Surprisingly, he is all that anyway—famous, admired, recognized—despite his deep wish and intimate appeal for a simple, authentic life, free from constraints and tensions and competition. He is an esthète, you see, erudite and curious, experienced in and with all things, who cultivates an exceptionally refined sensitivity to beauty in art, nature and people, with the most delicate attention to things like the perfect cooking time, seasoning or smell of all types of condiments that I didn't even know had a smell. I am always unsettled by this combination of care and consideration he has for others along with his supreme intelligence. In my experience, those are not very compatible. He values friendship tremendously and can be deeply hurt by trivial things (to me), which is another manifestation of his astute sense of bonding and reciprocation. Not something, again, that I would associate with intelligence. And that is maybe his most characteristic trait: he is starving for company while surrounded by it, he makes sure of this, his needs and standards for friendship being singular and absolute. He's got a huge network of relationships and seems to know everybody, especially everybody who is interesting. I've spent countless hours listening to him starting to read aloud a novel, except it was merely him speaking about someone, one of his relations: "so you see there's this guy who is this and that, and does this and that, and the weird thing is this, but what's incredible is that..." and he goes and goes and like an entomologist lays out the most accurate, incisive, deep portrait of a complete stranger. And like in all good stories, it's full of characters, and each one is also full of character. This stranger knows another stranger and you get someone new in the narrative. And they interact, and he laughs, and asks you, "can you believe it?" as he nods nervously with a smile stuck on his face and his eyes beaming at you to make sure that you can't believe it. He makes everybody look like a hero from a Lermontov novel. But while he generates contact abundantly, he seems to never get enough. He's always reaching for his phone to attend somebody else, some other story, some other universe where he'd like or where he'd need to be. That's a very ENFP kind of loneliness: never alone but also never met. I, for sure, am one who could never match his intensity. I don't know who could have, of the hundreds—literally hundreds—companions, encounters, colleagues, friends and more, and also those less, people just passing by, along with celebrities, people you know, more people you don't know, the whole world, really, who has crossed his path and who come back to you, whether you met them or not, through a lense that distorts the world like no type of optics can. I'm always surprised when I speak to someone who doesn't know him. I always tell them, then, you don't know him yet. I still remember how he once told me a sentence in which nothing made sense, but delivered as if it was the most obvious, the most natural thing in the world: «when I meet her, I'll be unable to look at her in the eyes...» which is the type of idle chat you only hear in paradise, where everybody eventually meets. I know few people who have such a deep and perceiving sense of humor. He understands everything. He often bursts out laughing at things that people say—me included—where they had no hope whatsoever for their comment to land anywhere. He catches all this mid-flight. He seems to care about everything and everybody. He also has, as a particular case of what I said previously, a strong sense of poetry, sometimes even shaping himself the world with metaphors, constructions and inspirations that are deeply poetic. Because he is humble and modest, also with an exquisite pudor—this type that is so perfectly pitched that you don't notice there's a dam holding a lake—he rarely shares this mode of expression. He did a few times with me at times when I was in need of nothing else but a poet soothing a plea with something beautiful. And he's someone who is familiar with everything beautiful, who has an understanding of beauty. This is not so common. That's probably what I like most in him. Beauty is not wasted on him. Hey, he could even find some in me... that's not given to many.

Along with Alexey Kavokin and my daughters, he is one of the handful of still alive people who have made the world a different place for me, and who remind me of this everytime I see them. It's a hand with four fingers only. It doesn't matter. It has the index to point at things. That's who he is to me.

His wife, Rocio Calonge, is a gifted art conservation-restorator [1].

Boat trips

Daniele is a sea captain and I've been lucky to have accompanied him in wonderful locations in the med sea aboard his Highlander:

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Wedding

The wedding with Rocio took place in the Acaya Castle (in Salento) with renaissance costumes and made a sensation. We regularly appear in newspapers for this event!


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