Sapiens

Turning to one of the oldest myths in our history, to the ancient Greek source, we find the first figure of an architect in our civilization: Daedalus, trapped in the labyrinth he himself built in Crete to imprison the Minotaur. Unable to escape by sea or by land, Daedalus devised a way to flee through the air: feathers fastened to his arms with wax. We generally remember only Daedalus’s first instruction — not to fly too close to the sun, lest the wings burn — but we forget the second, equally important one: not to fly too low, close to the sea, so that the damp would not weigh the feathers down. And so Daedalus, speaking to his son Icarus, urges him to ​“fly between the two”: «inter utrumque uola» (Ovid, Metamorphoses).

(Original text of 2025, machine translated in 2026.)