[Darwin in the Republic of Letters]

For those accustomed to thinking that the modern cultural dimension arose under the banner of a clash between the so-called "two cultures," the figure of Darwin the "humanist" could reserve numerous surprises. It was above all the well-known paleontologist S.J. Gould who pointed them out. He went so far as to track down, in the Italian cultural roots from Saint Francis to Galileo, an element of continuity between his own Darwinism and our literary tradition that passes through the writing of the masterpieces of the nineteenth-century natural sciences. On the basis of a similar, and also audacious, rereading of the cultural history, the essay proposes to indicate some possible developments of the new dialogue undertaken, beginning with the insertion of the scientist Darwin in the European horizon of the Republic of Letters. There are then indicated some historical-cultural categories that would merit reconsideration: the new figure of intellectual of the twenty-first century, the idea of a science immersed in the historical contingency and in the concrete pleasure of the subject that knows, the role of "sweetness" and of "wonder" also in the most rigorous study, and lastly the need of an in-depth knowledge of the Darwinian writing, not as a curiosity for the educational trend of the era of positivism, but as an indispensable epistemological requisite for a correct understanding of its science.