My first meeting with Silvio Ceccato - A remembrance of 1981

Milan, February 7, 1981

“The mind constituted itself in a magical way, without awareness”: I find this phrase by Silvio Ceccato transcribed in my notes from one of his conferences in 1981. In 1980 in Zurich, where I had been living for 10 years, a friend (Luciano Persico) had told me about Ceccato and I was fascinated by him.
Shortly after, during the summer holidays, while I was browsing in the bookstore, I found "La Terza Cibernetica" (“The Third Cybernetics”, Ceccato, 1974). Reading this book was like a revelation for me, I found in it what I had unconsciously been looking for for years.

At the end of 1980, after reading other books by Ceccato, my enthusiasm was such that I decided to contact Ceccato himself. On January 3, 1981, I wrote him a long letter, declaring among other things that I even thought I had found my calling and that I dreamed of being able to collaborate with him. Ceccato replied to me on January 9, we exchanged some letters and at the end of the month he proposed to meet in Milan on the occasion of a conference he was going to hold at the Hotel Palace (7.2.1981) entitled “Magic seen by a cybernetician”. He wrote: “it will finish at 5 pm and we will be able to chat.”

During the conference, as usual, I took a lot of notes. I was so focused on writing that in the end I felt like I had understood little or nothing. I was so ashamed of it that when the conference was about to end, I even thought about leaving the room (!) and going home without speaking to Ceccato. I was saved by my sense of duty: I had confirmed to Ceccato that I would be happy to meet him after the conference and I had to fulfill this commitment!

That meeting changed my life! It was the beginning of a collaboration that lasted for 17 years (until Ceccato's death, 12/1997) during which I gradually managed to lift the "veil of ignorance" that initially prevented me from fully understanding Ceccato's thought and set up the basis of my future studies dedicated up to today to the cybernetics of the mind.