In the film The Third Man while Harry Lime is riding the Ferris wheel in the Prater park in Vienna, he says to his friend Holly Martins that Italy, for centuries plundered, torn by interminable wars, massacres and tragedies of all kinds, nevertheless produced Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and the like, while Switzerland, despite centuries of peace, produced no more than the cuckoo clock.

Apart from the fact that Harry Lime makes two mistakes ( Switzerland has produced eminent men – which we often fail to remember because they wrote in French, German or Italian – while the cuckoo clock was invented in Bavaria), underlying his statement about Italy is a Darwinian concept of natural selection, a quasi-racist and eugenic idea, of the ‘races improve races’ variety. Moreover Harry Lime uses this argument to justify his lack of moral scruples and to pose as an ubermensch. A product of the horrors of World War II and the will=to=power, Harry Lime perhaps possessed a certain crinminal genius but he died in a swer without having created anything.

Are the Italians creative because they have suffered a great deal? I could mention other peoples, who have suffered horribly over the centuries and whose culture has not developed, remaining unchanged for millenia. So we must look elsewhere for the reasons for Italian creativity.

If you take a car and visit the United States you can travel for days and days through a splendid, immense landscape framed by boundless h orizons; if you travel through Northern Europe you can see horizons that are just as boundless as you drive along highways from which all you can see are magnificent fields of rye – and of course this is not to mention journeying through Siberia, the Central Asian steppe, the Sahara or Gobi deserts, or through the vast expanses of Australia, in the center of which stands Ayers Rock. It was the experience of contact with the immensity of nature that produced the idea of the Sublime.

In its modern form, the idea of the Sublime developed in the 18th century, an age of travelers with a taste for things that were exotic, interesting ,curious, different and amazing. This period marked the birth of what we might call the ‘poetics of mountains’.: the traveler bold enough to venture to cross the Alps was enthralled by impervious cliffs, endless glaciers, bottomless chasms, and boundless stretches of land. Even before the end of the seventeenth century, in his Telluris theoria sacra Thomas Burnet saw in the experience of the mountains something that uplifted the soul toward God, something imbued with a hint of inifinity and capable of arousing great thoughts and passions. In the eighteenth century, in his Moral Essays the Earl of Shaftesbury wrote that even the rugged crags, the mossy caves, the caverns and the waterfalls, adorned with all the graces of the wilderness, struck him as all the more fascinating for they represented nature in a more genuine manner and were enveloped in a magnificence far superior to what he described ass the ‘ridiculous counterfeits’ of princely gardens.