He belonged to the school of Italian neo-idealist thinkers, among a group of artists and writers who made Trieste of the early Twentieth Century a notable center of intellectual activity.
And we should not neglect the fact that his great fascination for the major exponents of German criticism and idealism provided him with conceptual weapons for his personal battle against the dogmatism, fideism, clericalism, inhabiting his own family environment.
In any event, this young rebel, often reckless in his decisions concerning practical affairs, often unresponsive to people he did not like, showed from the outset, on matters of philosophical thought, a seriousness, a prudence, a desire to explore and document deep questions, to an extent which is rarely found even in mature scholars today."
But Saba did not want to accept the verdict of fate and desperately begged his friend to leave him the Library; Fano eventually gave in.
But the friendship between the two suffered a tremendous trauma due to the tragic events involving Maria, sister of Virgilio Giotti, who Fano married in 1913.
During the period of the First World War, Fano was irredentist, like many of his friends, Silvio Benco [it], Saba, Giotti, Carlo Schiffrer [it] and others.
These position statements were not without consequences; in this regard we cite Treccani from the Biographical Dictionary: Professor of Philosophy at various high schools in Trieste since 1925, Fano aspired, however, to university teaching, which encountered many obstacles imposed by the authorities.
These difficulties were the result of his antifascist reputation, including a speech that he delivered commemorating his cousin Enrico Elia, a volunteer in the Great War who died in Podgora in 1915.
This political assertion earned him a few days in jail in the fortress of Koper and his reputation as an antifascist continued to have negative effects on his university career.
In addition to Florence, a significant fraction of his university education was gained in Vienna, where he had spent a few years before the war, immersed in the environment of La Voce.
But some of my peers who had him as a teacher, never ceased to tell me the surprise they experienced when, after listening to Fano, suddenly realizing that philosophy—that indigestible jumble of empty, abstruse and complicated concepts—became something extremely fascinating and current, even fun.
[8] One of these articles, entitled The Negation of Philosophy in Current Idealism (1932), brought him to the attention of Giuseppe Lombardo Radice, who offered him a position as voluntary pedagogical assistant at the Faculty of Magisterium of the Sapienza University of Rome.
In 1938, because of the racial laws then in effect, he was turned away from a university teaching position; he succeeded nevertheless in continuing as a professor at the Military School of Rome.
His quiet serenity, courage and heedlessness of danger never failed him, although constantly faced with the risks of being discovered by the Germans (he and his wife had falsified their identity cards) and of the Allied bombing raids.
We recount here an episode[9][10] that succinctly epitomizes both the importance that he attached to his work and his temerity and courage, one might almost call it his unconsciousness: One morning, coming down into the kitchen, which had become his studio, he found it invaded by German soldiers who were looking for water and more.
And then, with his usual calm demeanor, indifferent to the fact that he was a Jew, with the face of a biblical prophet, he pointed the Wehrmacht soldiers to the door: "Please," he said in German, "gentlemen, please, can you go somewhere else.
I would have to work.” Without a word the soldiers pushed the door open and left, and Giorgio quietly went back to his work table to resume his arguments with Croce.
When the war ended, he resumed his position at the University of Rome, and for a brief period he also held a temporary appointment as director of the Institute of Pedagogy of the Magisterium.
The essay was later expanded, following his intentions, into a more extensive exposition, the book Origins and Nature of Language[11] by his wife Anna and son Guido.