The work of systematizing the contents and creating this digital space is dedicated to Romano Màdera, my mentor, who appeared suddenly just when I thought everything was already accomplished.
Curated by Claudia Spinnato
This website is a place where you can dive in and remain inside, composing your own readings, listenings and paths, reclaiming the dimension of a supreme time, Kairós.
In this digital space, time is not Chrónos: what you watch, read and listen to here is not overtaken or suffocated by whatever arrives a moment later.
You are invited to explore it as a place where you do not need to hold your breath, feeling overwhelmed by the need to keep chasing an eternal present.
The images
The leitmotif is a sphere that reflects not what is around it, but what takes shape in our depths as we dwell in Romano’s thought.
The images are generated with artificial intelligence; I play with it – with the same seriousness with which children play – not to demonize it, but to use it to make visible the imagining otherwise that is our own, and from which we can begin to compose new worlds.
I dream and hope for a constellation of web spaces like this, belonging to another kind of time, forming a new, even if small, sky within the multitude of the web and social media.
To stay with things, to look at the physics beneath them. Over time, this posture becomes a way of inhabiting the world.
For anyone interested in this approach, another of my projects is Intersecare Mondi, where you can read more about me in detail.
This web space is a vision of the world born from my need to weave together the infinite ways of dwelling within Romano’s thought, of following it not only in its development over time but also across its foundational themes.
Chiara Mirabelli, in her introduction to A Philosophy for the Soul, the collection of essays by Romano that she edited, quotes Italo Calvino from Written and Unwritten World:
You have to inhabit that text and find a way of saying it as if it had been written in that other language, without losing its nuances and without distorting them.
Writing for the web is also another language altogether, completely different from writing for a book or an article.
To write about it here, I look up Calvino on Treccani online.
And I find that, precisely where he speaks about translation, he too is reflected in a transparent sphere.
A causal connections, for me, that are foundations of meaning.
On Translation, again in Written and Unwritten World, Calvino writes:
To write about it here, I look up Calvino on Treccani online.
And I find that, precisely where he speaks about translation, he too is reflected in a transparent sphere.
A causal connections, for me, that are foundations of meaning.
On Translation, again in Written and Unwritten World, Calvino writes:
«Translation is an art: transferring a literary text, whatever its value, into another language requires, each time, a kind of miracle.
The literary translator is the one who puts their whole self on the line in order to translate the untranslatable.»
This is what I mean by care: I too have put my whole self on the line to compose this web space – at once a compendium and a translation – because otherwise, how could that transformation happen which makes the analyst become the method?
Calvino again, at the beginning of the Letter to the Editor that introduces his essay On Translation, speaks of the vocation to become a translator.
Designing, composing and building this website has been exactly a mad, desperate study that would not let me step out of it until I had completed it.
I could not have done otherwise.
First and foremost for myself – Romano teaches that one always begins from oneself, even when it seems not so – but also, on the very same level, out of gratitude to Romano.
I happened, in the summer of 2020, to listen to the podcast of La mistica selvaggia on Uomini e Profeti. Discovering that one can speak of one’s own ineffable oceanic feeling, of seeing the world in a grain of sand, and that there are others who do so as well, was foundational for me.
A first step which – as Jodorowsky says – does not take you where you want to go, but does take you out of where you are.
A kind of miracle from which there flows – with all the effort and beauty of a journey still unfolding – my being here to tell you about this web space.
A place where one can resonate among kindred souls.
I asked a dear friend, who knows Romano’s thought well, to explore it in advance, and she wrote to me that it is powerful, in a very particular way, like this:
«All those flowers…
those flowers so intense in my eyes
they almost make them burst…»
Giorgio Caproni, Res amissa
Welcome!