Towards a philosophy of beauty and atmospheres

I grew up in Rome, and since my childhood I was intensely fascinated by the ruins and their atmospheres of ancient history. Even growing up in one of the cradles of Western civilization, I was deeply curious about foreign cultures. Thus, just as I began studying philosophy at high school, I also started an intensive language course at the Japanese Culture institute in Rome. At the time I was already in love with Japanese literature, especially authors like Kawabata, Mishima, and Tanizaki, and I wanted, sometime in the future, to be able to read them in the original. That was the first time that I realized the challenges and the rewards of literary translation. I later studied Philosophy at the University of Rome La Sapienza, and since at the time there was no course on non-Western philosophy available, I slowly began reading Japanese thinkers on my own. Among them, I was especially influenced by Nishida, Kuki, and Watsuji. After graduating I spent a period in Berlin, Germany, working as a translator: not only of philosophy and other essays, but also of haiku (collections and essays by Akutagawa, Shiki, Sōseki). My field of research ended up including both Western and Japanese philosophy, as well as literature. While translating Watsuj’s Fūdo after moving to Japan, I discovered the philosophy of atmospheres of Hermann Schmitz, and this led me back to Rome, where I got my Ph.D. with a dissertation focused on the role of wind and atmosphere in Japanese aesthetics. I am interested in the ways in which the formless, the invisible, and the impermanent became central experiences of beauty in a non-European context. Thus, after earning my PhD, I remained on a similar trail, with two postdocs at Kyoto University dealing with scent and thought in a Japanese cultural framework. I am currently writing my first book on this topic.