Greek philosophy
Philosophy was not born from Greek democracy
Thales thinks back almost eighty years to the reforms of Cleisthenes, on the other side of the Aegean. Philosophy and democracy were born from the same habit, and philosophy came first.
Intellectual life
Critical analysis is not a summary: what remains
The summary returns the plot, which is forgotten. Critical analysis asks what the work teaches, what it argues against, and what it requires you to change. This is what decides what remains of the reading.
History of ideas
China and North Korea: reeducated to love the regime
It's not science fiction: children who spy on their parents, camps that teach to love the regime, and room 101 that Orwell only named.
History of ideas
Orwell didn't predict 1984: he recognized time itself
He didn't invent Oceania looking to the future, he looked sideways: Stalin, Hitler and Thomas More's utopia, turned inside out.
History of ideas
Rewriting the past is the most efficient power move
Surveillance requires apparatus, torture requires time. Changing a record is silent and definitive: the sharpest argument of 1984.
Literature and philosophy
1984, by Orwell: summary and analysis
Oceania, the three classes of the Party and the perpetual war that perhaps is just theater. Why 1984 didn't predict the future, it recognized the present.
Philosophy
Conviction or fear: the line between authority and power
Illegitimate power dominates through fear, manipulation or force. Legitimate authority is followed by conviction. The distinction that separates a government from a tyranny, and a faith from emotional domination.
Philosophy
God and the State, by Bakunin
Bakunin wanted to abolish all authority, religious or state, in the name of individual freedom. The pendulum effect asks: does this solve the problem, or just restart it?
Philosophy
Between total control and chaos, the middle way
Neither the absolute control of 1984 nor Bakunin's absence of authority. The middle way is the re-education of citizens in virtues and duties, and it begins in the classics.
Philosophy
The pendulum effect: escaping one extreme
Bakunin reacted to state and religious oppression by proposing the total abolition of authority. The pendulum effect explains why this type of reaction rarely finds the middle ground.
Literature and philosophy
Room 101 and the end of Winston Smith
O'Brien doesn't want Winston to confess, he wants Winston to believe. Why the outcome of 1984 is worse than death, and what room 101 has become today.
Literature and philosophy
The Party's three slogans in 1984
"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength." Why 1984 slogans aren't catchphrases, and how modern euphemisms do the same job.
Church History
Castel Gandolfo, the residence of the popes
Why popes have spent their summers above a volcanic crater since the 17th century, and why that's changed twice in recent decades.
History and travel
Castelli Romani, what to see
Frascati, Castel Gandolfo and Lake Albano, in the volcanic crater that the Roman elite chose to escape the city more than two thousand years ago.
Art and Renaissance
The Italian garden is an idea of the world
Geometry, axis and water tamed, level after level. The Italian Renaissance garden does not describe nature, it argues against it.
Philosophy
Otium: why leave the city to think
Roman otium is not leisure, it is method. From Cicero in Tusculum to the popes in Castel Gandolfo, retreat has always been part of the work of thinking.
Philosophy and politics
Eichmann in Jerusalem: banality of evil
What Hannah Arendt meant by the banality of evil, and why the expression is as often cited as it is misunderstood.
History and travel
Studying before traveling changes what you see
The same stone says one thing to those who pass by and another to those who arrive prepared. Why cultural preparation changes the trip, not just explains it.
Philosophy and politics
A plaque on the ground weighs more than a monument
Why a ten-centimeter plaque on the sidewalk does a work of memory that no monument can do.
Art and Renaissance
Water Organ, in Villa d'Este
A 16th-century hydraulic machine plays music in Tivoli without electricity and without anyone playing. How it works, and why it remained silent for two centuries.
History of ideas
SPQR, what does it mean
Senatus PopulusQue Romanus, and the small detail of the enclitic -que, which almost no one explains properly.
Art and Renaissance
Villa d'Este, in Tivoli, what to see
What to see in Villa d'Este, from Tivoli, in order of route, from the Water Organ to Viale delle Cento Fontane.
Art and Renaissance
Fountain of the Turtles, in Piazza Mattei
The Renaissance fountain in Piazza Mattei, the real authorship behind it, and the addition seventy years later that no one can explain.
History and travel
Jewish ghetto in Rome, what to see
The complete route through the oldest Jewish quarter in Europe, from the Theater of Marcellus to the Great Synagogue, in the order in which it happens on foot.
History of ideas
Jews in Rome, the oldest community
From the 2nd century BC to the Arch of Titus, from the 1555 ghetto to the Greater Synagogue: how the Jewish presence in Rome never stopped.
History of ideas
Stumbling stones in the Rome ghetto
What are the small brass plaques in front of the doors of the Rome ghetto, and what happened on the dawn they mark.
Literature and cinema
Le notti bianche: Visconti films Dostoevsky in Rome
Visconti transferred White Nights to Livorno and built the entire city inside a Roman studio, an artifice faithful to the spirit of the book.
History of ideas
The dreamers of European Romanticism
Dostoevsky's dreamer has brothers in Europe: Foscolo's Jacopo Ortis and Leopardi's young man who waits. A guy who crosses borders.
Philosophy and psychology
Idealized love: why we love an idea, not a person
The person in love does not love the other as an object, but the idea they created of them. A concept from White Nights, by Dostoevsky.
History of ideas
Dostoevsky in 1848, before the tortured genius
In 1848, Dostoevsky was not yet the tortured genius the world would come to know: a young man of 27, acclaimed in the salons and silent within.