(Preface to the 15th year Italian edition of The Black Swan)
I met Luca Formenton, Saggiatore’s capo twenty years ago, in April 2002, in the eternal city, in a mozzarella bar-terrace near the parliament. I spoke in highly ungrammatical Italian; he addressed me in impeccable English, a practice we have sort of maintained for twenty years. That was the period when I very badly wanted to satisfy my failed childhood dream to produce literature, but everything conspired to stop me from partaking of that highly protected genus.
I was in Rome supposedly for a conference on risk but I just wanted an excuse to be in Italy (coincidentally I also made friends with Daniel Kahneman on the same day, another, more complicated story). Luca was the first literary editor who was interested in my work, thanks to an intercession by the late Marco Di Martino.
By then I had written the first volume of the Incerto, Fooled by Randomness, a book that was practically impossible to publish. It was a continental style meditative essay and the Anglo Saxon world, in spite of their infatuation with Montaigne and Umberto Eco, were about five hundred years late to the genre. The official “subject” (an essay is not supposed to have such a constraint as a subject) was a random mixture of autobiography, philosophy (of…
