Master of civic commitment and humanity, lover of De André and big Hollywood

Last night Marco Onado, a colleague at Bocconi University and dear friend, left us. He was well known to the readers of this newspaper for his insightful and witty comments on the financial news of the day. Accustomed to benefiting from his company, given with modesty and simplicity, only at this moment of farewell do we realise how much, over the course of his long professional life, he contributed to the growth and collective consciousness of our country.

He did so, to begin with, with his textbooks on which generations of students have learnt the fundamentals of finance in a linear, rich, never boring way: discovering how the market is the place of rules, and how these rules (something too complex to be left exclusively to jurists) require a lucid and rigorous analysis of economic and social power relations. We need only open those books again, as if they were music boxes, to hear the smiling, calm timbre of his lectures again.

We will then recall his activities as a civil servant: expert for the parliamentary commission of enquiry on Sindona, member of the committee that drew up the single text on finance, authoritative commissioner of Consob. It was precisely this last experience that enabled him to demonstrate his stature as a man and citizen when, having been indicted on grotesque charges at the outcome of a very unclear investigation, he resigned on tiptoe so as not to harm the institutions.

We will also be left with his numerous popular books, written to explain to the general public complex and scurrilous, yet important events in our lives, such as the subprime mortgage crisis and the sovereign debt crisis. Volumes interwoven with wit, paradoxes, literary and cinematographic references; capable of transforming the most indigestible morsels of banking history into a continuous joy for the reader's palate. Until the bitterest, Lost Illusions, written with his friend Pietro Modiano: a punch in the stomach with which he denounced the inadequacy of a ruling class that has deprived Italy of a horizon of possible growth.

But economics and finance were only a stain on a palette capable of infinite colours: Bagehot's phrases found a place alongside the texts of Brassens and De André frequented by heart, sequences of big Hollywood films recited at a bar table, inexhaustible books of fiction and poetry, quotations from Gianni Brera and a passion for his Milan team. It was as if the scholar's convictions, his positions in public debate, his unforgettable lectures on the financial system emanated from a formidable placenta of humanity, curiosity, understanding. The same that nourished his beautiful family, constantly open to friends: his beloved Mariella, his children and grandchildren always welcome at the farmhouse in the Tuscan countryside, to the sweet Joy, the German shepherd who shared every moment of his autumn years.