We know everything about prudence, we know its merits and virtues, but it is now imprudence that is practiced by most. Maybe we should start writing about it, in a light and ironic way, as the famous economic historian Carlo M. Cipolla did about stupidity, in the classic "Allegro, but not too much".
The two essays that make up the new agile pamphet ("The art of imprudence. Dialogues and secret letters") by Franco Botta, a refined intellectual and economist from the University of Bari, point out well, through an irony seasoned with civil passion, how imprudence has also gained space and consensus in Puglia, a region known for having been inhabited for a long time by a population of ants. “Today even in these places imprudence and courage dominate and risk-takers abound on the scene” reads the inside cover.
The two essays use the form of dialogue and letters to argue, as was the custom in the eighteenth century making use of the imagination. In fact, the author thinks – like Martha Nussbaum – that literature has the ability to condense into a few lines what usually requires pages and pages.
Many of the people mentioned in these pages exist and are known, while others are the result of the imagination. Both the dialogues and the letters were not supposed to have any circulation. Random events instead allowed the former to be recorded and the latter saved on a computer, finding space in the newspapers and now in this small volume that really deserves to be read.
