News have appeared recently over the net that our friend and colleague Ali Morteza Samsam Bakhtiari, has passed away in October of this year.
You can read in other places about the career and the achievements of Ali Samsam Bakhtiari. Here, I can only report something about his trip to Florence in March 2007 where he spoke at ASPO-Italy 1, which was, I believe, the last international conference he attended.
Ali's talk in Florence was a true experience for all of those who heard
it. It was a deeply felt summary of the world's situation in which Ali
managed to blend his remarkable knowledge of different cultures. He
spoke in Italian to an Italian audience, citing at length Dante
Alighieri's "comedy" and other European authors. The title of his talk
was "towards nowhere" and the concept that he expressed was that, after
the peaking, we enter in a no-man's land where all our models will
fail. We need to recover our roots, to have a different attitude
towards nature, to plant trees.
I also had the pleasure to have Ali Samsam Bakhtiari as a guest in my
house and to have the pleasure of long conversations with a man of
great culture and of great experience. He brought to us gifts from Iran
and we are honored to have his signature in our guestbook.
You can see a recording of Ali Samsam Bakthiari's speech (in Italian) at ASPO-Italia1 at