"These wasps behave just like those men who...": Irony and Optimism in Baroncelli's writings

Abstract

How can you conjugate scepticism and optimism? Irony and solidarity? Flavio Baroncelli spent most of his life, both as a scholar and as a human being, on this hard task, and his writings are there to show the results he achieved. Perhaps owing to the colloquial tone employed, his editorials in the section called "Scostumando" (published over the Nineties in the Italian newspaper Il Secolo XIX) offer an excellent sample of his "sceptical" but "reasonable", "analytic-ironical", "communication-intended" style.