Starfinancer

Every human being is the architect of his fortune, the ancients said. Beyond circumstances and destiny there is, in each of us, the possibility of doing something extraordinary. And the ability to share knowledge and achievements is an important accelerator of our civilization. It is an idea that history has proved right: let’s think about how many inventions, how many progresses have marked our evolution over the millennia. With so much success that today we even tend to forget the long path that brought us to where we are.

Each of the objects that we use every day, of the habits that appear natural to us, required genius. At a fatal point in history, a different look at reality, an invention, a gamble, has produced something that was not there before and which, through subsequent modifications and improvements, has become the mobile phone we type on, the can that we uncork, the car we drive or the asphalt we tread.

Not to mention the variety of our communicative and artistic expressions: we can hardly remember that until a handful of decades ago there was no cinema, but there was a time when there was no perspective in painting, the number zero, the writing itself. Therefore in each volume of this series we will dedicate a few pages to tell a small story, the day of two people like many others; and we will see how in this single day the discoveries and inventions of humanity are present in every hour, from awakening until late at night.

The adventure of human intelligence is the greatest story that can be told, and it can never be exhausted. In these books we have decided to present sixteen great fields in which human genius has shone more than ever: from writing to medicine, from music to economic exchanges, passing through stories closer to us such as flight, photography and cinema, ‘electricity. We will explore these worlds without claiming to map them in full, as they are millenary stories.

But we will meet many protagonists and we will experience key events. We will be next to Albert Sabin who gives his polio vaccine to the world for free ea Guglielmo Marconi which sends the first radio signal; to Amelia Earhart flying across the Atlantic and Gutenberg bending over the printing press to make his Bible. In the last and important volume we will retrace the story of the relationship between man and the Earth, the ways in which we have changed our ecosystem, the birth of ecology and the greatest of the necessary discoveries, the one we still have to do: how to save our Planet.

We will see that the history of the human genius is not just a history of individual intellects, or strokes of luck. It is above all the result of long processes, and of the collaboration of people of good will. Progress is made together: knowing how to live and work for the common good is what makes us human, what makes us brilliant and what makes us better.