June 27, 2024 10:12 am
He passed away on June 25th in Lamezia Terme hospital Writer Paolino Mongiardoat the age of 91, after a long illness, constantly assisted by the care of his daughter.
Contemporary philosopher, specialist in the psychology of writing and criminal investigations, Paolino Mongiardo taught literature and philosophy in public schools, practicing the profession of psychographologist consultant, first at the Court of Rome and then, upon returning to Calabria, for the Court of Lamezia Terme, where he often went to meet his daughter Antonella, school director .
Author of numerous philosophical essays and texts on the psychology of writing, Paolino Mongiardo was born in Sant’Andrea Apostolo dello Ionio on 15 June 1933. At the age of four he lost his father due to a bad accident. The only child, he remained to live with his mother until the age of 14. At this age, a few months after the terrible earthquake of 1947, he left Calabria and ventured to his beloved Rome in search of a job that would allow him to support himself and attend an evening school for workers. He only had a primary school diploma and dreamed of obtaining a high school diploma over time, by working, which at most was usually achieved by his fellow villagers, sent to school by their parents with all the means at their disposal.
Paolino, having found the 2000 lire needed for the ticket to Rome, unbeknownst to his family, collected a cardboard suitcase with personal effects and left. He, looking at the illuminated town as the train began to move, with tears in his eyes swore to himself that he would never return to the town unless he had a degree.
In Rome for the first few days he found asylum with distant relatives in the town, but soon he found a job as an apprentice shoemaker and went off on his own. It was the only job that he knew how to do because in the village from the age of eleven to 14 he had worked in an excellent shop, his mother not having had the economic possibility to send him to school like the other boys. He found his first job in a shop in Via Alcamo. He found the second job in Pigneto with an artist named Armignacca and the third and final job in Rome he found in Via di Torpignattara, in the shop of a cobbler of Sicilian origin. It was the Holy Year, 1950, when Paolino finally managed to find a Roman school that he taught by correspondence, the Istituto Volontà in Via Arno. To have more time to study after work, Paolino moved to Vercelli, where he had been offered a job in the Military District, overlooking the sports field, where he never set foot so as not to waste time to the detriment of his studies. After a year of intense preparation by correspondence he takes external exams at the Salesians of Soverato and is promoted in the first instance. Encouraged by his success, he enrolled for high school at the same institute, where he became the favorite student of the mathematics professor Aldo Maruccelli, with whom they later met together in the capital, where Marrucelli became a mathematics professor at the architecture faculty.
After finishing high school, Paolino enrolled at the Augusto classical high school in Rome. A luxury that he could not afford but with the financial help of his relatives living in Brooklyn and some afternoon work he managed to attend high school in the morning. Having obtained his classical high school diploma, the young man enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy at La Sapienza University, where he was fortunate enough to have the cream of professors as teachers: Ugo Spirito, Guido Calogero, Natalino Sapegno, Ettore Paratore, Franco Lombardi, Aldo Ghisalberti and Visalberghi, Raffaello Morghen.
It didn’t seem true to him when the president on duty at graduations that day, who was Guido Calogero, nominated him a doctor of philosophy. An immense joy, but experienced alone, because there was no one with him to congratulate him, like all the other relatives present at the ceremony did. He wrote his degree thesis, published after 56 years, setting it up as a pamphlet to be published. It was his first official writing, after what he had done as homework at school or at home under the supervision of Ugo Spirito.
He taught for twenty years in high schools, during which he did not write any books. In retirement, Paolino Mongiardo resumed writing, composing and publishing 10 books and several texts on philosophical topics that have not yet been published. Controversy on Historicism between Tilgher, Croce and Gentile. “This essay on the philosophy of history, composed by me in 1966 for my degree thesis-the author writes- has the aim of demonstrating, today as then, that even when humanity is distressed by the lack of security and distrust towards eternal values that seem to have been lost forever, as was the case at the time of the two world wars and as always happens when the sense of history becomes tormented at the points of crisis of human becoming, the reassuring words of Benedetto Croce always stand out, the philosopher endowed with the necessary serenity and coldness, against the instinctive and rowdy irrationalists and nihilists, to avoid errors of evaluation. The significant meaning of the present work, in which, at the time of its drafting, I was the first, among philosophy scholars, to discuss the heated Historicism-Anti-historicism controversy, conducted without quarter, in the period between the two world wars, by Adriano Tilgher with Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile, the student against his masters, the two unconquered giants of thought, is to be recognized in the wise and incomparable words of Benedetto Croce, with which this treatise concludes”.
This text by Paolino Mongiardo also received appreciation in the academic environment ten years later, when professor Gianfranco Lami, full professor of Philosophy of Law at the department of Political Sciences of the “La Sapienza di Roma” University, wrote a letter to the professor Paolino Mongiardo from Calabria, looking for him in his country of origin, to congratulate him and to propose exchanges of ideas, in order to acquire study material useful for his soon-to-be-published work.
In the politics, society and criminology genre, Mongiardo has written works of notable merit such as “Deeds and misdeeds in our democratic republic”, “The shoemaker who went beyond the shoe”, “Let those who have never copied cast the first stone”, “Autopsy of a judicial investigation”, “Identikit monster of Florence” and “Trends towards crime and illegality from writing”, a guide for those involved in criminal investigations, and for psychiatrists and psychologists who want to find reliable evidence through analysis and the study of handwriting.
The last philosophical essay, the eleventh, concerns the epistemological problem in Tommaso Campanella, taken to heart by the publisher Gangemi of Rome, based in Via Giulia. Paolino Mongiardo, before dying, expressed the desire to dedicate his last book to his beloved daughter Antonella, who years earlier had suggested the idea of writing it and of whom he always thought, during the writing, as his muse.
The funeral was celebrated in the cathedral of Lamezia Terme, where Paolino Mongiardo had decided to move to stay close to his daughter Antonella and nephew Alessandro.
