For some time now I've been wondering if it still makes sense to keep a blog alive.
Maybe yes. Perhaps precisely because today it seems a bit retro.
The blog doesn't run like social media.
It does not disappear after twenty-four hours.
It doesn't pretend to be immediate, brilliant, synthetic at any cost.
Rather, it is a place where things can stay.
Where thoughts have time to settle.
Where writing becomes memory, exercise, care.
Graham Greene noted:
“Writing is therapy,
Sometimes I wonder how all those who don't write,
they don't compose music or paint,
they manage to escape madness, melancholy, panic
which are implicit in the human situation.”
Well, perhaps the blog is also this: a small way out.
In mine you will find scattered notes, reflections on science and art, fragments of a novel, visions of our tomorrow, books and films that have shaped me, the cultural projects that I have tried to build.
I invite you to enter it, to read it slowly, to use it to get to know each other better.
But there is one thing I want to tell you. This digital space is not a refuge, it is rather a threshold.
Ideas, if they remain confined behind the glass of a screen, evaporate. To trigger a true "molecular transformation", words must become breath, impact, comparison.
We use this blog to recognize ourselves in the open sea or, as Calvino wrote, "in the sea of objectivity". But then, please, let's close the screens.
The spaces of the historic headquarters of the Italian Institute for European Studies, of my terrace in Naples and, since June, of the new headquarters of the IISE in Naples in the Church of Santi Cosma e Damiano, exist precisely for this reason.
To transform solitary thoughts and readings into choral actions.
I'll wait for you between those lines. And, immediately after, in reality.
Image (All, Alighiero Boetti, 1992-1994)