Di mondi impossibili attecchiti nel letame: dalla Bersabea di Italo Calvino alla Medusa di Galileo Galilei

Andrea Cannas

2019-01-01

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Abstract

The image of Bersabea (Invisible Cities) oscillates along the axis of the polarity between the most precious and the most vile of materials, namely diamonds and dung. Calvino takes part to a tradition of antagonistic thought, where the conceptual evolution of the diamonds/dung antonymy is actually deeply rooted in some critical passages of two works, More’s Utopia and Galilei’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which founded both the tradition of modern utopia and the scientific method. On his part Galilei, while contemplating the ruin of the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic paradigm, approaches the unthinkable idea of an absolute otherness: he hints at the ontological impossibility of an adamantine eternity and hypothesizes unconventional worlds originating from mud. The impossible, in this case, appears as the last frontier of the provable.