Like the night sky, the inside of our mind has attracted cosmographers since ancient times: philosophers, novelists, theologians and poets have examined, contemplated and deciphered thoughts, passions and desires. Gradually a language for describing the mobility of the ego and of the emotions has evolved, and the point of greatest consonance with the living rhythm of the world has been located in the depths of the mind. This representation and its object – inner life and its fantasies, but also its distances and sidereal silences – are today in danger of being lost, owing to the dispossession of the self by the seduction of virtual proximity and the noise of communication.

Swimming against the tide of the times, Antonio Prete deploys his skills as a scholar of comparative literature to survey a subject that is vast in scale and of immense cognitive importance, deftly selecting thematic figures and key passages from authors ranging from Augustine to Joyce, and from Montaigne to Proust and Calvino, with particularly frequent recurrence to his beloved Leopardi and Baudelaire. These authors, together with the artists who have defied the unrepresentable with their self-portraits, build up a ‘grammar of interiority’, defining the eternal forms of feeling – amorous or meditative, joyful or grieving, astonished or reminiscent. Without drawing on this vocabulary we couldn’t even recognize what is happening inside us.