Events Events calendar

The Cat Who Explained the Universe to Me • Meeting with Riccardo Azzali

When

May 23, 2026

Where

Open Baladin (Foro Boario square)

hours

Typology

Conferences , Literature

Share on

•••

Saturday, May 23, 4 pm • Open Baladin (Piazza Foro Boario, Cuneo) • Free, online reservations

For Leonardo Brezzi, a brilliant young theoretical physicist, understanding the universe means observing it through the lens of a telescope or analyzing it with an abstruse equation written on a blackboard. His mission has always been to seek order in the chaos of the cosmos, trusting numbers rather than sensations; Leonardo, in fact, considers every phenomenon—time, space, matter, life itself—as a problem to be solved. Until one morning like any other, his furry white cat, Epidoro, decides to break the simplest rule in the universe: that cats don't speak. And Epidoro doesn't just talk: he reasons, observes, connects, provokes. He quotes Sartre, Seneca, Einstein, dismantles every one of Leonardo's certainties, asks him personal questions that weigh like millstones, and then licks his paw as if nothing had happened. At first, the physicist's rationality struggles with this new, surreal reality in which Epidoro proves far wiser, more cultured, and more witty than his master. But then, little by little, Leonardo surrenders to the evidence, and the cat becomes a mentor to him, a Virgil who forces him to truly experience the questions about the universe he had always studied with detachment, to immerse himself and experience firsthand quantum physics or the idea of time, the concept of free will or nothingness, the entropy that disarrays everything, and the human need to make sense of the cosmos and our existence. Riccardo Azzali 's The Cat Who Explained the Universe to Me (Mondadori) is a book in which philosophy and science are not abstract exercises of thought, but vital knowledge, fundamental tools that teach us to discover and experience the wonders of the universe.

Interview the author, Raffaele Riba.

Riccardo Azzali is a theoretical physicist with a passion for philosophy and one of Italy's most popular popularizers. On his "filosofiascienza" profile, he uses a simple and direct style to illustrate to his audience the big questions that have intrigued the minds of history's greatest scientists and philosophers for millennia. In 2025, he published The Academy of Great Questions.