"Nothing is more expensive than lifting all the veils that cover before oneself the dark background of nature itself. Nothing more difficult or more unpleasant. I have always been very self-critical with myself. I have often spoken, as in this conversation, of the lesson of the classics. The first and most lasting lesson that they have left me is that of humility, that of not believing it, that of not losing the sense of proportion ". Doing an almost conscience examination, without rhetoric or complacency, Norberto Bobbio allows himself to be invited to a dialogue in which he makes the inventory of his personal "office of living, of teaching and of writing". From the family memories of childhood and youth - in the extraordinary Turin of Leone Ginzburg, Cesare Pavese or Giulio Einaudi, of which he was a friend - until the years of fascism and then of democracy, from his first readings and his academic training to his less well-known interests, such as music, film or passion for the mountain, these pages are an evocative portrait of the personality of Bobbio and a breviary of his teaching as "man of culture." The conversation with Pietro Polito is complemented, in the current Spanish edition, with "Invitation to dialogue", lecture given by Norberto Bobbio in 1951 and which will head his well-known volume of essays Politics and culture (1955). A text that condenses the main characteristic of his intellectual journey: the aversion to fanaticism and the commitment to the critical spirit.