With this anthology, of which an augmented edition has just been published, Antonio Prete provides a global map of a modern feeling: nostalgia. The starting point of the inquiry is a dissertation which Johannes Hofer presented to the University of Basel in 1688, where the term nostalgia appears for the first time. Hofer uses the term (derived from nostos, return home, and algos, pain) to describe the melancholy which afflicted Swiss soldiers serving in foreign garrisons.

The neologism immediately focused attention on a sickness which affected not only the Swiss but armies of every nation, and which came to be studied extensively in treatises on military medicine. But it was in nineteenth-century Europe, with its exiles and migrants, that the sickness was transformed into a popular feeling.

And it is this feeling with which Antonio Prete is concerned; he illustrates its birth, the stages of its growth, its changes, and the major texts that discuss it: von Haller, Kant, Rousseau, Pinel, Boisseau, Tissot, Zimmermann, Starobinsky, Jankélévitch. In this new edition, Prete has increased the number of original texts and added an essay on the relationship between nostalgia and poetry. For poetry has a special ability to look out over the abyss. And it is in poetry that we can return to what we have lost, to the things we feel nostalgic for.