Viaggio alle regioni equinoziali del Nuovo Continente

“Ever since my youth I have felt a burning desire to travel through distant and unexplored lands. This is a dream that characterises that age in which life appears before us like a boundless horizon, when nothing is more attractive to us than major upheavals of the soul and the image of tangible peril.” La Coruña: 5 June 1799. A young Prussian scientist prepares to set sail across the Atlantic Ocean, leaving behind not only the European continent but also the 18th century. Up until then, all journeys had been ones of exploration, opportunities to broaden the horizons of the known world. The expedition that von Humboldt carries out together with his friend and botanist Aimé Bonpland comes to an end in 1804, after having travelled through much of the three Americas (Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Cuba and Mexico, only to return to Europe via the United States) and it is, as Franco Farinelli writes in the introduction, “the journey of journeys, in the sense that its form sums up and includes all genres and all means: from the sentimental journey to that of exploration, from the scientific journey to the literary […]; for this reason, the American space is definitively acquired, purified at last of every myth and belief attributed to it by European culture.” Once back in Europe, he brings together this scientific, intellectual and naturally adventurous experience in the thirty volumes of the Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent. The anthology, curated by Franco Farinelli, paints a faithful portrait of the man and the journey, and is illustrated by Stefano Arienti.