Alessandro Pizzorno, arguably the foremost Italian sociologist of the second half of the Twentieth Century, died on April 4th, 2019. A mentor, a friend, a colleague to some of us, Sandro was an inspiration to all of us. As memorial tribute, we are grateful to Roberta Sassatelli for publishing here the English translation of her interview with Alessandro Pizzorno in 2007. That conversation is introduced by her with a brief essay on Pizzorno’s conceptions of recognition, mask, and identity. Written especially for this tribute, Sassatelli’s introduction focuses, in particular, on The Mask, an essay that Pizzorno wrote in Paris in the early 1950s — around the same time that Erving Goffman was writing The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. More than sixty years later, Pizzorno’s deep insights and lively ideas are highly relevant for current debates about identity.