The ancient lights Among the countless legacies we have inherited from Greek and Roman civilizations, I would like to speak here about rationality. What is rationality? It is the primacy of reason in human interactions, that is, the necessity of discussing everything, of debating with one goal in mind: not to determine who is right, but to assess the soundness of our arguments, based on logical truths and factual truths.

Leonardo da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452, in Tuscany, to a notary father and a peasant mother who left her son with his natural father, who raised him along with his nine brothers and two sisters. The mother was forbidden to see her son. His grandfather was also a notary. Leonardo da Vinci did receive an education, but it was very limited: he learned to read in the vernacular and would only study Latin later, as an autodidact. It seems that Tuscan nature served as his mot

Nothing is given, everything is to be conquered, and the aspiration to the sublime is what we are allowed to experience in Florence: time has stopped there on good taste, on beauty "universal and without concept", as Emmanuel Kant would later say.

"In the spring, which suits this city so well that speaks to us of flowers, I decided to come from South America to finally realize an old dream: to reopen, with a group of apprentice philosophers, the Neoplatonic Academy of Marsilio Ficino."