Abstract

The article relates the story of a long friendship and a profound intellectual bond between the author and Paolo Leon started in the mid-'70s, and ended only at the death of Leon in 2016. The author develops a story that overlaps both the families' private life, and the political and the intellectual dialogue over time. It all began with a brief work experience in Umbria, in Perugia, where already in an embryonic form Paolo Leon would anticipate 10 years before almost all of the main topics of the economy of culture and of the local development. Those arguments would definitely merge subsequently into the economic policies of the Italian government and that of the European structural funds.