A spasso con il cane Luna

Written on lazy Sundays, “with the sole desire to tell compelling stories”, the short texts gathered here offer a taste of the omnivorous curiosity that is the driving force behind every scientist, even those who, like Vallortigara, “spend their time studying the language of fireflies and the taboo of incest in moths”. Intertwining ethology, neuroscience and a love of literature, and constantly pushing the boundaries between different disciplines, Vallortigara outlines a fascinating itinerary in these pages: he takes us, for example, to Capri, in the footsteps of the Estonian ethologist Jakob von Uexküll; or to discover the cognitive prowess of Physarum polycephalum, a single-celled organism capable of extending its protoplasmic branches into a network that rivals the Tokyo railway system in efficiency; or, again, in search of the reason why the alternating use of the right and left nostrils in a dog can shed light on the different functioning of the two cerebral hemispheres and explain why part of humanity is left-handed. Debunking the most common prejudices about the animal world, Vallortigara offers surprising revelations – about the empathy of ants and the altruism of parrots, about the results of genetic selection processes in chickens, about the mysterious place in the brain where memory is stored, about the biological origin of human beliefs in supernatural entities. He reminds us that animals, as well as being wonderful friends, are above all “an inexhaustible source of questions”.