My first memory of Giandomenico Picco dates back about 20 years, when I was working on an independently produced documentary titled Why Is Kofi Annan Not a Woman?, an examination of gender equality in the leadership of the United Nations. The hope was that, as the term of the U.N.’s seventh secretary-general drew to a close, a woman would succeed him on the 38th floor of the Secretariat building. Things turned out differently. But Picco’s words stayed with me.

He spoke of his work as a negotiator in every corner of the world and of the many women he had encountered who played an indispensable role in diplomacy. Their work, he explained, was often less visible and its impact less immediate than that of their male counterparts, but it was no less crucial to the delicate balance of international relations.

I remember him addressing these women directly, urging them to be ready to “think outside the box” and challenge conventional boundaries. That was how they could seize opportunities that prejudice and entrenched practices otherwise kept beyond their reach. His message was delivered calmly, with what might have seemed like gruffness, but it carried the unmistakable firmness of a true son of Udine, in Italy’s northeastern Friuli region.

The encounter confirmed the image I had already formed of Picco: a man whose extraordinary professional record preceded him, a “soldier without a gun,” as former U.N. Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar described him. His story had been told in books and newspapers and passed down through the recollections of more seasoned colleagues. From the moment I began covering international affairs, I had felt an instinctive curiosity about Picco — a fascination that may also have fueled my own irresistible attraction to the world’s dusty trouble spots.

To make a long story short, Picco’s remarkable career can be summed up through a handful of defining episodes. The full résumé and the long list of honors he accumulated over more than three decades can be left to the archives.

Picco served the United Nations for roughly 30 years in conflict resolution, rising to the rank of Under-Secretary-General. He was directly involved in negotiations that helped bring the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan to an end in 1988 and secure a cease-fire in the Iran-Iraq War that same year. He also took part in important peacekeeping missions in the Balkans.

But perhaps the most celebrated chapter of his career was his role in the U.N. effort to free Western hostages held in Lebanon. Between 1989 and 1992, he worked to secure the release of people kidnapped by militias linked to the Amal movement, some of which would later be absorbed into Hezbollah. Over the years, he also worked to bring home other missing people and detainees held without due process.

Shiite militias had carried out a prolonged campaign of kidnappings. During those years, 104 people disappeared, including 26 Americans, 16 French citizens, 12 Britons, and seven Swiss and German nationals. On Sept. 11, 1985 — his birthday — the militias abducted an Italian as well: Alberto Molinari, Vice President of the Chamber of Commerce in Beirut.

“He was never found,” Picco would say, referring to one of his deepest regrets.

Among the other hostages was Terry Waite, a British Anglican envoy who had gone to Lebanon to negotiate an agreement, only to be abducted himself on Jan. 20, 1987. He spent five years in captivity, held in isolation and darkness while suffering from asthma. Then there was Terry Anderson, the Associated Press journalist kidnapped on March 16, 1985. After enduring the longest period of captivity among the American hostages, he was released on Dec. 4, 1991.

William Buckley, the CIA Station Chief kidnapped in March 1984, was brutally tortured and reportedly executed, though accounts of his death differed. Marine Lt. Col. William Higgins, seized in 1988, was hanged by his captors. The bodies of the two Americans were dumped in the trash, a grotesque warning to others.

There were too many victims. Understanding the links between the Shiite militias and the Iran of the ayatollahs, Picco reached out to old American contacts, including Javad Zarif, whom he had met while Zarif was studying in the United States and who would later become Iran’s top diplomat. Those relationships offered a possible opening for negotiations.

Picco obtained the go-ahead from Pérez de Cuéllar. What followed required the courage of a diplomat willing to put himself directly in harm’s way. With his face covered and his body curled up in the trunk of a battered Mercedes, he made his way to the men holding the hostages. He was terrified, his throat tight with anxiety and fear churning in his stomach.

“My thoughts were with my wife and son, whom I feared I might never see again,” he recalled.

He made one trip after another, eventually negotiating with the organization’s top leader and persuading him to agree to the hostages’ release.

The last to emerge from the underground prisons of a Beirut ravaged by 15 years of war were two German aid workers, Thomas Kemptner and Heinrich Struebig. Kidnapped in 1989, they were released on June 17, 1992.

“Those were the happiest days of my life,” Picco later wrote in his book, Man Without a Gun: One Diplomat’s Secret Struggle to Free the Hostages, Fight Terrorism, and End a War.

He was a man without a gun, but with a heart and courage of extraordinary caliber. The honors he received from countries involved in the hostages’ release — both symbolic and tangible — testified to the scale of his achievement. “President George H. W. Bush offered me American citizenship,” Picco said. “I declined.”

The end of his U.N. career, however, seemed almost encoded in his DNA. Picco clashed with U.N. bureaucrats who viewed his unorthodox approach with skepticism and were wary of the notion of a “disarmed diplomat.” Eventually, he left the Secretariat.

I was fortunate to discuss all of this with Picco himself, often over the phone when I called his offices at GDP Associates, the strategic consulting firm focused on the Middle East and Central Asia that he founded in 1994. Sometimes I interviewed him. At other times, I would come up with some improbable request for his opinion on an article, calling as much for the pleasure of hearing his views as for the chance to glean a little-known detail from his experience.

Some of our most memorable conversations took place about five years ago, around the time I was preparing to travel to Lebanon to interview Hezbollah figures about the group’s involvement in the Syrian conflict against the Nusra Front and the Islamic State. These were the fighters of God descended from the very militias Picco had encountered during the long nights he spent amid Beirut’s ruins.

At the time, we were organizing a presentation with the United Nations Correspondents Association for Il Califfato del terrore: Perché lo Stato Islamico minaccia l’Occidente (The Caliphate of Terror: Why the Islamic State Threatens the West), by Maurizio Molinari. It was Molinari who insisted that Picco join the panel, turning the book presentation into a conversation with the former Under-Secretary-General. He wanted to understand what had changed between the wars Picco had confronted and the new war on terror that was then reshaping the regional and international landscape.

Before the event, we met for coffee several times outside the U.N. Secretariat. Picco would arrive in an immaculate gray double-breasted suit, carrying a black umbrella, his blue U.N. passport tucked into his pocket — just in case, he would joke, someone refused to let him into the building.

There were also long telephone conversations, sometimes at improbable hours, in which he revisited the past and tried to make sense of the future.

One of his abiding preoccupations was the symbolism of the number eight. He told me about it in an email after a dispute with a publishing house over the use of the date 8/8/88. He asked me to be scrupulous in preparing the biographical note we would use to introduce him at the U.N. Correspondents Association event.

“The key to my life is the number eight,” he wrote. “I was born on Oct. 8, 1948, and I mediated the Iran-Iraq War cease-fire after eight years of war, on 8/8/1988. Then, at the end of the 1980s, I began negotiating the release of the Western hostages.”

His reflections often led to questions that had occupied thinkers for centuries. What would become of the Old Continent as the nation-state began to lose its central place in the world? And why was Europe struggling to emerge as a cohesive regional power?

These were among the questions we discussed during that long conference. Picco spoke with his characteristic firmness, at times shedding the measured restraint of the archetypal man from Udine. His growing disillusionment with an institution he no longer felt he belonged to was accompanied by signs of physical fatigue.

We stayed in touch after that, but gradually skepticism and exhaustion began to take hold.

In a detailed profile and interview published in 2017, journalist Gianni Riotta closed with a question about whether Picco’s audacious courage would have worked against ISIS, or with the jihadists holding the Jesuit priest Paolo Dall’Oglio and businessman Sergio Zanotti in Syria.

“My world was simpler. The United States and the Soviet Union were in charge. Now it’s a jungle,” Picco replied. “I went in when everyone was telling me, ‘Make a career for yourself. Why put yourself through this?’ Because I didn’t believe a U.N. diplomat could be equidistant between terror and tolerance. I paid a heavy price for my choices, both publicly and privately.”

As Riotta observed, Picco’s eyes lit up when he recalled those nights in Beirut a quarter-century earlier. But his expression darkened when he turned to the present.

“Because the life of a hero is hard, lonely and unpaid,” Picco reflected.

And yet, that calling leaves behind memories — indelible, humane and unconditional — that belong to all of us, young and old alike. That, at least, is my own conclusion.

Now Giandomenico Picco — the man before the negotiator — has passed into the afterlife, where perhaps he is trying to mediate between the devil and holy water. It is memory that must now make him eternal.