Blake would have been unimpressed by modern scientific efforts to find imagination among the firing patterns of neurons, as if it was just another cognitive function of the brain, like motor control or smell perception. Likewise, he would have scorned the idea, favoured by some cognitive scie...

On the right mount Vesuvius stood out in the company of Monte Somma, on the left the chain of Monte Cerreto blocked the passage towards the Coast. In the background, beyond the spire of the bell tower of Pompeii, the island of Capri could be glimpsed floating glistening in the waters of the Gulf ...

No one is able to give an answer, and then ghosts, spirits, presences, spells, fairies, witches, wizards, spells, exorcisms, esotericism, astrology, sataneries of various kinds are born. People in good faith who seek, people in bad faith who answer and deceive. Thoughts and feelings, affections a...

In a technological age like ours, is there still room for imagination, mystery, fantasy? If our reality tends to the imagination, can the imagination be reality? Do you believe in ghosts or evil spirits? Would you spend a night in an isolated house where, it is said, "it feels"? Imagination, fant...

Yet until a few hours earlier those places had been a massacre of rituals and violence, in the sad and obscene glare of the moonlight. Disheveled and violent women, with long hair and eyes burning like fires, had given themselves to wild dances around the cluster of trees that surrounded the grea...

If they were flames of hell, those women who danced wildly and obscene were witches who raped their prey, men tied to trees. A cruel and inhuman music shattered the eardrums of those who had the good fortune to hear it. Barefoot, swaying, intoxicated with hatred and sex, they raised their macabre...

That large cottage was nothing more than the sum of many houses built side by side over the years, in an alternation of stairs and terraces, windows and balconies with closed arches. It was shaped like a large piece of shapeless cheese, with many irregular holes, in a succession of empty and empt...

When at the first light of day the owl stopped its mournful nocturnal song, those places had an irresistible charm in the light of day. At the foot of the mountain, a large valley stretched out as if in musical harmony towards the sea, after having slowly lost altitude and height. The river meand...

A warm wind had risen. It came from the valley, from the distant sea. It came as if to collide with that cold and frozen death from the north, behind Alvano's long neck that dominated from above. A sudden vortex enveloped everything, a whirlwind that mingled with the cries of the witches and that...

‘To me,’ wrote William Blake in 1799, ‘this world is all one continued vision of fancy or imagination.’ The imagination, he later added, ‘is not a state: it is the human existence itself.’ Blake, a painter as well as a poet, created images that acquire their power not only from a certain naiv...

Then all was silent when the owl let out a long hiss that chilled hearts and made the shadows vanish. A flash behind the mountains had announced the arrival of the sun. In a moment nature fell silent and time stopped. All was calm and ready for good luck and happy sunshine. A young ray of sunshin...