After the success of The Volcanoes of Iceland (Iperborea, 2019) in this new book, Leonardo Piccione takes us back on the trail of Guillaume Le Gentil, an eccentric and very unfortunate 18th-century French astronomer who persisted in going on the trail of Venus (a planet that will be the subject of more studies and expeditions in the coming years).

But what does the life of this extraordinary personage have to do with that of an Italian, an Apulian from Corato, transplanted to Iceland and with a degree in Statistics?

The originality of the proposal lies precisely in this: the author has managed to give us back such a distant history, rereading it under the prism of us inhabitants of planet Earth, in the 21st century, creating a work that is a veritable Wunderkammer, chock-full as it is of anecdotes about astronomy, literature, science...

A gem for intelligent and curious readers.