Roberto Calasso (30 May 1941 – 28 July 2021) was an Italian writer and publisher. Apart from his mother tongue, Calasso was fluent in French, English, Spanish, German, Latin and ancient Greek. He also studied Sanskrit. He has been called "a literary institution of one". The fundamental thematic concept of his œuvre is the relationship between myth and the emergence of modern consciousness. Biography Calasso was born in Florence in 1941, into a family of the Tuscan upper class, well connected with some of the great Italian intellectuals of their time. His maternal grandfather Ernesto Codignola was a professor of philosophy at Florence University. Codignola created a new publishing house called La Nuova Italia, in Florence, as his friend Benedetto Croce had done in Bari with Laterza. Calasso's uncle, Tristano Codignola, was a partisan during World War II who after the war joined the political life of the new republic, and was for a while Minister of Education. His mother Melisenda – who gave up an academic career to raise her three children – was a scholar of German literature, working on Hölderlin's translations of the Greek poet Pindar. Calasso's father Francesco was a law professor, first at Florence University and then in Rome, where he eventually became dean of his faculty. He was arrested by the fascist militia after the assassination of Giovanni Gentile and sentenced to be killed in reprisal, but was saved both by the intervention of friends of Gentile, with whom the family had connections on the maternal side, and by the German consul Gerhard Wolf. At 12 Calasso met and was greatly influenced by a professor at Padua University, Enzo Turolla, and they became lifelong friends. In 1954 the family moved to Rome, where Calasso developed a passion for cinema. His English literature doctoral dissertation was Sir Thomas Browne's theory of hieroglyphs, which he completed under Mario Praz, while indulging himself with hashish. Calasso worked for the publishing firm of Adelphi Edizioni since its founding by Roberto Bazlen in 1962 and became its Chairman in 1999. In 2015, he bought out the company to prevent it from being acquired by a larger publishing firm. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages. He was the author of an unnamed ongoing work reflecting on the culture of modernity, which began with The Ruin of Kasch in 1983, a book admired by Italo Calvino. Dedicated