Laura Bazzicalupo
Superbia - La passione dell´essere

One of the things I miss the most during exam periods is the time to devote to readings that are not strictly academic (but then again, after hours spent with books, one prefers to use the little free time in other ways, maybe dedicating even a little bit to their already scarce social life). Therefore, in this exam-free period, with the added help of weather anything but summery with only four rainless days in a month, I had enough time to make up for lost time.

What I am about to review is one of the, not coincidentally, 7 books that compose the series published by Il Mulino on the 7 "deadly sins". Initially, I feared the books would be limited to sterile and easy bashing of prudish morals or an equally easy and sterile glorification of sin to win over the sympathies of pseudo-alternative amoral people or to horrify some bigot, but thank heavens, things turned out to be more interesting. Although managed by different authors (usually philosophy professors), the texts reveal a similar underlying structure and contain a description of how the respective sin was born and how it evolved in human thought from antiquity to modern times, naturally focusing on the 3 major ideological-cultural matrices that have most influenced us "westerners": the classical Greco-Roman; the Jewish; and finally, the Catholic, but there are also quotes and references to cultures more "foreign" to us.

These are booklets of about a hundred pages that a skilled reader will finish in an afternoon, also because the themes are treated with professionalism but also with a certain irony/lightness (these books should be considered more of an intellectual "divertissement" rather than a real treatise). The reading is further enriched by continuous inserts, references, quotes, and analyses of famous works and characters, making the reasoning less "abstract" and more fluid. Naturally, it is not possible to thoroughly cover topics of such scope in a few dozen pages, but nonetheless, the reading provides a quick overview of our history and helps us to broadly understand the principles underlying certain aspects of our modern thinking, besides offering, in any case, some interesting points for reflection.