Angelo Tonelli presents: The Greeks in us. The “un timely” relevance of Greek Wisdom

The event, with FREE ENTRY, aimed at the entire citizenship, is realized in collaboration with Feltrinelli Bookstore and with the funding of the Center for the Book and Reading.

Angelo Tonelli, considered one of the most important living Hellenists, is a scholar of ancient philosophy, philologist, poet, translator, author and theater director (director of the Iniziatico Theater Company) as well as an intellectual attentive to the crisis and the drifts of contemporary society. He studied Ancient Philosophy in Pisa, with Giorgio Colli, and following in the footsteps of his master, he has always been interested in the recovery of the original Greek Wisdom, illuminating its connections with the East and the ancient Spiritual Tradition of the land.

His fifty-year studies have been crowned by numerous monographic publications of the texts and fragments of the Greek philosophical corpus and beyond, ranging in many fields of investigation: the Wise and the presocratic philosophers, the mystery religions, the Orphic tradition, the Dionysian and shamanic traditions, the Greco-Egyptian alchemy and the magical-oracular tradition. In addition to these works, there are translations of Greek and Latin lyric poets and authors, of the great tragedians, with forays even into twentieth-century poetry.

The constant study of the Ancients, combined with an interest in Jungian psychoanalysis and personal existential practice, has led him to a constant dialogue between past and present, where the latter is observed with the arcane gaze of the ancient Wise, still throbbing and alive under the ashes of contemporary emptiness, absence, and nihilism. Hence his creative and intellectual research. Furthermore, he has dedicated sharp reflections to universal human themes and the twilight of our civilization, proposing a message of awareness and integral presence, in order to deal with the increasingly rampant barbarism and to be able to refound social living on the values of the “perennial philosophy” that once inspired the great spirits of Antiquity.

As a poet, he has published four volumes (“Canti del tempo”, 1988; “Frammenti del perpetuo poema”, 1998; “Poemi dal Golfo degli Dei”, 2003; “Canti di apocalisse e d’estasi”, 2008) winning the Montale Prize for poetry in 2012.

For Feltrinelli’s “Classici” he has translated and edited “Dell’Origine” (1993) by Heraclitus, “La terra desolata. Quattro quartetti” (1995) by T.S. Eliot, the first volume of “Le parole dei Sapienti” (2010), dedicated to Xenophanes, Parmenides, Zeno, Melissus, “Eleusis and Orphism. The Mysteries and the initiatic Greek tradition” (2015), “In the luminous abysses. Shamanism, trance and ecstasy in ancient Greece” (2021), “Dell’Origine” (2023) by Parmenides, “Pythagoras, the secret Master. The father of Wisdom between mysticism, science and politics” (2025). Tonelli’s latest work, “The sophists and the eclipse of wisdom”, dedicated to Gorgias and Protagoras and concluding the decade-long cycle dedicated to the earliest phase of Greek philosophy, will be in bookstores on January 27, two days before our meeting.

For information: biblioteca@vespucci.edu.it