"When I wandered around Naples sixty years ago, breathing in the salty air amid the cries of the fishmongers, I certainly did not encounter the Absolute Spirit, which advances through history via its dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. I was assailed, painfully and sweetly, only by the manifold reality. I saw the faces of the Neapolitans, their mocking expressions, with an ancient and popular wisdom, at one with the courtly and familiar misery of the “most noble Naples”, between the baroque solemnity of the monuments and the squalor of the slums. I told myself that Hegel's “Ratio” was far removed from all this, from the beauty of the women, from the dazzling glances of the dark eyes behind the long lashes of the girls down in Via Toledo and Chiaia, in the boisterous cheerfulness that greeted you everywhere, even in poverty, even in the tattered multicoloured clothes drying in the alleys in the night breeze, under the moon. Was it perhaps the Absolute that was the subject of the real world, of history, or rather the multiplicity of individuals, with their authentic needs? (from “'L'assoluto e l'odor di pesce”', p. 20)"