Il nuovo laboratorio della natura COPERTINA ROVINATA

COPY WITH RUINED COVER. The beauty of the mountains is a recent invention. Its scientific value was long considered zero. For many centuries the mountains have appeared as "inequalities", horrid places and dangerous barriers to human action. Only when, starting from the late Renaissance, scientists understood the importance of leaving the libraries and reading the "book of the world", a new interest was formed, which perceived the mountain as a crucial place: a sort of laboratory of nature capable to tell the long and complex history of the earth. At the same time, some city intellectuals found the wild landscape and the restless charm of the mountains exciting, spoke of a "pleasant horror" and inaugurated a new taste and style. Thus the rules of classical aesthetics are overturned and "beauty with thrill" finds a new definition in an ancient term: the sublime. For the Romantics the need for a new language arises, fragmented and frayed like their unstable heart. The mountain, a crucial place for understanding the organization of our planet, speaks to us of a new and difficult beauty, of a maternal and threatening nature in which we contemporaries, frenetic and anxious for peace, can recognize ourselves. A modern, surprising and welcoming mountain, ancient and avant-garde. This book is a completely renewed, enriched and updated version of Nature's Laboratory, from 2001.