The professor Pasquale Giustiniani introduces Giuseppe Ferraro's book, "Le idee cadono dal cielo. La riforma di Giordano Bruno e l’amore di Platone" (Ideas Fall from the Sky. Giordano Bruno's Reform and Plato's Love), a work that inaugurates the "La bottega delle idee" series, directed by Ferraro himself. The book compiles discourses originally delivered in Naples, transforming them into written text to reach a wider audience. Giustiniani emphasizes how Ferraro practices philosophy as "thinking while walking and walking while thinking," an approach aimed at "repairing the sky" and the soul, reassembling fragmented ideas to make sense of the world.The volume is divided into two parts: "The Reform of Giordano Bruno's Sky" and "Plato's Love." In the first part, Ferraro reinterprets Giordano Bruno's thought, particularly "The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast," not only as a reform of the starry sky (in light of Copernican theory) but also as a reform of the soul and the collective imagination. Ferraro highlights how Bruno, through an "artifice/magic" that is philosophy itself, intervenes in the world to preserve life and proposes a symbolic geometry of the soul. The allegory of the main dialogue characters, including Saulino, the common man, and the addition of the Cillenian Ass symbolizing the universality of human asininity, are also mentioned.
The second part of the book focuses on Plato's love, re-reading the "Symposium" and starting from a phrase dear to Aldo Masullo: "Love empties us of externality and fills us with intimacy." Ferraro connects this reflection to the contemporary tragedy of Giulia's murder, elevating it to a symbol of a "state tragedy" concerning social bonds. The role of Diotima in the "Symposium" is emphasized, a female figure who transcends binary reasoning and defines Eros as a demon, a philosopher who is "beautiful and good" precisely because he is neither in the traditional sense. The concept of love is explored as desire and lack, a movement that drives towards being, and the evangelical phrase "Noli me tangere" is invoked to express the inappropriability of beauty and the "tremendous" nature of love when it becomes possession.
Giustiniani concludes his commentary by highlighting the return to the character of Metronatte, a Stoic philosopher mentioned by Seneca, who held lectures in Naples. Through Ferraro's book, the reader engages in a dialogue with various philosophical figures, reassembling "fragments of stars fallen from the sky to earth," in an operation that is both intellectual and profoundly human and political.