Hope allows us to look at reality with eyes not clouded or obscured by appearance or habit, convention or repetition; it allows us to open ourselves to the future, freeing us from the rigid cage of the past and present. In Speranza e disperazione [Hope and Despair], Eugenio Borgna follows the concept of hope through moments in literature, on the one hand, and his work in psychiatry on the other. Hope may be fragile, but it is the only way to pull human beings out of loneliness and the darkest depths of the soul. Consistently listening to patients, and in close conversation with the poetry of Cesare Pavese, among others, he paints a portrait of the slender figure of one of life’s most revolutionary forces. With a preface by Ilaria de Seta.