Prometeo has never regarded disciplines as separate rooms. History, science, philosophy, politics, art, and literature acquire their fullest meaning when they are allowed to communicate—when a question arising in one field unexpectedly finds an answer, or perhaps a more fruitful uncertainty, in another. This issue, number 175, offers a particularly rich example of that editorial vocation.
Its defining quality might be described, borrowing from Greek philosophy, as multiplicity. The journey begins with Italy’s colonial adventure in Ethiopia—an enterprise at once grotesque and tragic—and reaches the scientific principles underlying the renewed interest in nuclear energy, particularly Small Modular Reactors. It moves through the ancient Mediterranean, from Pharaonic Egypt and the kingdom of Israel to Venice and Constantinople; then arrives at an intense and reflective eighteenth century, when European thinkers were still struggling to define such words as humanity, freedom, knowledge, and happiness.
Other contributions turn toward the present and the future. The Artemis II mission allows us to look once again at the Moon—and at the Earth—through new technologies and thousands of images. The legal struggle against gender discrimination and the role played by intermediary organizations in combating the Mafia show how institutions can evolve when rights and collective responsibility cease to be abstractions. Meanwhile, the relationship between technology, political power, and post-democracy emerges from an extensive interview with political philosopher Carlo Galli. His critical reflection on sovereignty, artificial intelligence, and the increasingly pervasive presence of technology in institutional, social, and individual life touches upon one of the central questions of our time: whether the instruments we create remain at our service, or gradually begin to redefine the very conditions under which we live.
The Crossover in this issue is devoted to death. Four scholars from different fields lead us from its medical and legal definition to animal perception, near-death experiences, and the metaphysical questions that gather around the end of life. This may seem an unsettling subject, yet death is perhaps both the most inescapable and the most carefully repressed reality of contemporary civilization. To examine it is not an act of morbidity, but one of awareness. In our December issue, incidentally, we shall explore its apparent opposite: longevity.
Palmiro Togliatti provides a different kind of journey. The first part of Nunzio La Fauci’s essay follows the many names adopted by the austere leader of the Italian Communist Party and an authoritative member of the Comintern. Behind the public figure—often remembered as severe, even bureaucratic—we discover the traces of a more adventurous identity. The twentieth century, it seems, has not yet exhausted its capacity to surprise us.
Art offers its own forms of movement. Kandinsky flees the catastrophes of his century while transforming the language of painting; Erté turns geometry, color, and dream into an unmistakable vision; and Stephen Alcorn, whose work also appears on our cover, reveals the genesis of a live drawing through a sequence that makes visible the elusive passage from observation to line.
Finally, in Dulcis in fundo, we remember Francesco Guccini. His songs belonged to a particular history and geography, yet crossed generations because they transformed private experience into collective memory. Francesco belonged only to himself. Guccini belonged to all of us.
There is much more in these pages than an editorial can reasonably introduce. Perhaps that, too, is part of Prometeo’s identity: not to offer a single path through knowledge, but to create encounters among ideas that might otherwise never have met.This September also marks another beginning for Prometeo. On September 29, the English edition will begin its international journey, bringing the magazine—and its distinctive dialogue among disciplines—to readers beyond Italy. And if, like me, you think of September as the true beginning of the year, may it be a happy new beginning for us all.
Gabriella Piroli