De Senectute is the intellectual testament of the man who is considered to be the most important living Italian philosopher. Bobbio offers us his reflections on old age and makes a militant plea against the marginalization of the elderly in our society. The balance of a life dedicated to the study of the fundamental issues of law and politics.

"While the future world is open to the imagination, and no longer belongs to you, the world of the past is the one where, through remembrance, you take refuge in yourself, you return to yourself, you reconstruct your identity, which has been formed and revealed in the uninterrupted series of all the acts of life, linked together, you judge yourself, you absolve yourself, you condemn yourself, and you can also try, when the course of life is about to be consummated, to draw the final balance. We have to hurry. The old man lives on memories and for memories, but his memory weakens day by day. The time of memory advances in the opposite way to the real one: the memories that emerge in reminiscence are all the more vivid the further away in time those events are.

But you also know that what has remained, or what you have managed to pull out of that bottomless pit, is but an infinitesimal part of the story of your life. Don't stop. Don't stop serving. Every face, every gesture, every word, every song, no matter how far away, recovered when they seemed lost forever, help you survive."

Norberto Bobbio