Si un dit assenyala la lluna

One day a few years ago, the narrator of this book saw a video on YouTube that spurred him on a journey that would take him first to Florence and later to the Chilean desert of Atacama. In the video, Italo Calvino, author of Why Read the Classics and himself one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, said, without a shadow of a doubt, that Galileo was the greatest prose writer of the Italian language. Why did a man of letters like Calvin profess so much literary admiration for a man of science like Galileo? What do they share with each other, despite the rigid separation of knowledge in science and literature? Former professor of physics frustrated by the limitations of academic programs, journalist specializing in the dissemination of science, handwriting driven by a fertile curiosity and a sense of existence that we could call romantic, the narrator has the intuition that the answer only you will find in the telescope with which Galileo changed the world 400 years ago now. What if not a certain artistic spirit and a lot of imagination could have made sense of the distance between what seventeenth-century optical science allowed us to glimpse and the revolutionary conclusions it reached?