ON the first day, God created Dotti...
ON the second day, God created light, so all could see Dotti...

The importance of Nicola Francesco Dotti to the LSE community and the universe at-large cannot, in the words of the great George W. Bush, 43rd president of the United States, be "misunderestimated."

As the third-in-line Evaristo Beccalossi of the LSE campus, Dotti has proven to all of us he is capable of forging new methods of social interaction and ways of thinking on many issues, from the accession of Turkey to the European Union, to the amount of glasses of port wine that may be consumed on an evening of dissertation decompression.

I got to know Dotti first as a champion for Italian students' rights, but later discovered he was a champion of women's rights (he is not a saint). He then surprised me with his unusually intimate relationship with Marco Magini, a tantalizing union between Lombard and Tuscany I previously thought impossible. But love truly knows no boundaries...a truth I could only know to be true when seeing Dotti and Magini in the 6th floor kitchen with the door locked and the windows fogged up. They say that was because the kitchen gets really hot and the door was locked to keep the sub-warden out, but....

...Enough about the two lovers. Dotti is an amazing and charismatic person with a great sense of humor. He can light up the room with his smile, and warm you with his beard in the dead of winter. Knowing him during my year at LSE was truly an honor and privilege and made it all the more difficult for me to leave London. Dotti is a brave soul; he jumped in to break up a BNP rally in Birmingham while the rest of the city turned away and ran. And I knew we had become especially close when he admitted a deep secret in his family, that he was a camel in his past life. It was a special moment.

Good luck Dotti! Down with the monarchists! We will all miss you!

Nishad (a.k.a "Nishi" or Beccalossi n.1)