René A life

At the centre of this autobiography is a non-practising Jew, who knows six or seven languages, who has a multiplicity of interests, who lets his mind run wild without confining it to a single speciality, and who travels around with the portable library of his Kindle. An international banker and serial entrepreneur who has withstood the abrupt changes of political, social and moral seasons: and what often saved him has been a shrewd irony, the art of mocking the dissonances, the obstacles, the paradoxes or absurdities that pave the road of humans.

The life of René de Picciotto, with its continuous emotional and professional regenerations, its emotions, feelings, falls and rebounds, spans eighty years of history, punctuated by encounters with sometimes intriguing figures such as Maria Callas or King Farouk of Egypt. Everywhere one finds a trace, a furrow, a spark capable of moving one to be alive, even if only through comparisons with what has been and what is, in anticipation of what will be, in a world distressed by questions seemingly devoid of answers.

The myth of Aeneas returns, after all, carrying his old father Anchises on his shoulders and holding his young son Ascanius by the hand: a modern transposition of a character subjected to the overwhelming burden of the past and the uncertainty of the future.