By analyzing and putting into perspective the history of ‘the West’, this book aims to understand what kind of future can we expect for it (and us all). The ‘West’ in this context means all ‘westernized’ countries in our modern world, countries that have adopted Western lifestyles, ideas and set of rules, from a capitalist economy to the rule of law. Schiavone’s frame of reference is a global one, not focusing specifically on one country or another, but instead looking at the set of subjects, forces, and trends that allow us to define the macro-horizons of what we can expect.

Sometimes you feel like cursing it, like the devil that might have spawned it; other times you want to hold it dear, like a cherished travel companion who instills in the threshold of our consciousness the agony and bewilderment we feel at the idea of nothingness.

What are these ‘vanities of vanities’ of which Qohelet speaks supposed to be? Is this a message of desperation or an appeal to Lady Liberty?

This new edition of Ovid's masterpiece is characterized by Guido Paduano's translation, which resumes, revised and with further improvements, the one that came out in 2000 in the Einaudian "Pléiade," already considered to be of absolute excellence. Paduano has written an introductory essay for the occasion that delves into the relationship between metamorphosis and death and analyzes the various types of transformation recounted by Ovid.

In the now distant past extraordinary women and men worked to assert ideas and dreams in places where new times were taking shape. Re-reading their lives Ernesto Galli della Loggia brings to light decisive and neglected figures and episodes of the Italian history. As in the case of the Bandiera brothers and Don Tazzoli, subtracted from the "mothballs of conventional patriotism" to retrace that hidden Risorgimento "little or no liberal, much less democratic”.

In 1851, Arthur Schopenhauer formulated a famous metaphor to describe the difficulty of articulating the relationship between closeness and distance in relationships. On a cold winter's day, a number of hedgehogs come close together to warm each other and not freeze to death. Soon, however, they feel the pain of each other's thorns, and are forced apart. Then when the need to warm up brings them together again, the first problem reoccurs; and so on, tossed back and forth between the two ailments.