I still remember the intensity with which I devoured the pages of Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss. I devoured them obsessively, with one precise aim: to find the magic formula by which all those people had arrived at success. That book, in the end, is nothing but the distillate of the conversations Ferriss has had on his podcast with his titans: hundreds of hours in which someone recounts who and what shaped them. I didn't realise it at first, but the first path I took came from exactly there.
I found it. It was made of these ingredients: passion, discipline, dedication, mentoring, networking, inspiration; but also failure, defeat, luck. So I asked myself: why not "steal" from these giants a small piece of their formula, and try to put together one tailored to me?
But an essential piece was missing, a solid base to start from. Each of them had a clear idea of what their field of action would be, and most of them discovered it at an early age thanks to someone who had gone before them and opened the way. A pioneer. There is always someone who goes ahead, who walks an unexplored field or pushes past the limits of an existing discipline and wanders into the unknown, clearing the road for those who come after. Just like someone opening a new path in the mountains. And the generations that follow take up the baton, carry the exploration forward, and in turn inspire someone else to walk that road.
I never had a path like that. I belong to the category they call generalists: people whose field isn't circumscribed, who manage to range widely and sometimes to excel in disciplines and subjects far apart from one another. Not a super-specialist in anything, but good enough to hold my own on several fronts. The reason is simple: sources of inspiration have never been lacking for me, and whoever lets themselves be inspired by everything struggles to choose just one. For years I considered it a flaw.
It took me a long time to understand what I excelled at, and I understood it thanks to a book: Ikigai, the Japanese art of understanding yourself. I discovered I was good at learning, at catching and interpreting those small nuances that later turn out to be fundamental and disruptive. I discovered I was born to go down rabbit holes and come out with such a mass of lessons that I then struggle to manage it. My purpose, in the end, is to learn and grow constantly. It isn't my own idea: Seneca wrote to Lucilius that one must keep learning as long as one lives.
So I began to travel through the pages of great figures, in search of those secret ingredients to distil into notions and lessons. And I picked up a habit: I bought the titles I found mentioned inside other titles. Or, if in an interview someone cited the books that had inspired them, well, within seconds they were already in the basket.
I understood soon enough that those connections couldn't be ignored, and that I needed a system to record and catalogue them.
All this connected to a desire to communicate that I had put off for too long: I couldn't find the theme to start from, again because of the thousand different inspirations. Then it became clear that the theme was exactly that: to draw a map of the paths connecting the titles I was reading. And that is how The Scipionic Circle was born.
It wasn't simple, because I had many ideas born on different occasions and I had to recompose them like a puzzle, looking for the perfect fit.
The name, first of all. The Scipionic Circle was a political and cultural group in the Rome of the second century BC, gathered around Scipio Aemilianus, which promoted Greek culture, philosophy and literature within the Republic; among its members were the historian Polybius and the philosopher Panaetius. The idea of bringing together titles by different authors connected to one another seemed to me coherent with that round table: a gathering in which to share a common idea, a path, a direction.
Then the idea that is perhaps the strongest: the rhizome, which I took from A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari. The rhizome is an underground stem that doesn't grow vertically according to a hierarchy, but horizontally, branching out from common points in every direction. The concepts that connect books behave in the same way: they don't develop upwards, but sideways, almost at random.
That is why inside the site I built a rhizome generator. You can generate the map of connections yourself, selecting your favourite authors or the concepts that interest you. You'll discover that the theme you're exploring turns up again, in a different key, in the pages of authors you'd never have thought to put in relation.
The site's library is in constant evolution and contains books read and books ready to be explored. For now you'll only find the titles I've read myself, but with your help this project can become something bigger and unexpected.
At the start I wrote that there is always someone who opens the path for those who come after. I don't know whether mine is a path, but it's traced and it's open. The journey has only just begun, and the Circle never stops learning. As Goya wrote at the bottom of one of his drawings, two thousand years after Seneca: Aún aprendo. I am still learning.
