“Continuing dreaming knowing that you are dreaming” while holding on to the “weak thought” in order not to lose the horizon
for a meaningful human action; maybe this is the only path we can follow to find Giovanni Battista Piranesi staring at us
from his imaginary world. In the threshold of the epistemological split, the mysterious dimension of the world became the
only space, where an architect could act poetically. At this point, “how did the true world finally became a fable?” How did
Piranesi create his “fictionalized experience of reality”2 to open a way for aletheia by opposing the ideal of an objectified truth? How did he communicate with the ancient times within an excess of history?
These questions become crucial when we place Piranesi on the edge of an era whose grounds are shifting towards the age of
reason. In order to be able to understand Piranesi, we have to interpret, which ideas constituted his reactionary and avant-garde
position in his time. Piranesi stands as a dreamer, who was not naïve about the realities of the world. He engaged himself
with the “disclosedness of beings”, not to lose himself in them, but rather as Heidegger denotes “such engagement withdraws
in the face of beings in order that they might reveal themselves with respect to what and how they are, and in order that
presentative correspondence might take its standard from them.”3
Authors and persons mentioned; Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Joseph Rykwert
Thus only through the power of employing the past for the purposes of life and of again introducing into history that which
has been done and gone, did man become man; but with an excess of history man again ceases to exist and without that envelope
of the unhistorical he would never have begun or dared to begin.