When I organize the Philosophical Academies in Florence, I always try to arrive a little early, for several reasons. First, Florence is a city I love to explore alone, in the manner of my dear André Suarès, and preferably when the tourist crowds have dispersed, at the break of dawn, when sunrise peeks over the Arno, or at night.

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."