"This book is a journey, of course, but the path does not go in one direction. We could imagine its content as a great caravan route, or a road of the ancient Romans, placed side by side and each oriented in the opposite direction. We would like to show some stages where the two great archetypes, the West and the East, found themselves coming close, overlapping and infl uencing each other. The West seen from the East, and the East seen from the West. Two diff erent narratives, two diff erent ways of looking at things, yet nevertheless in dialogue. We want to narrate the subtle connections, the diffusion of a few symbols: the two broken parts that come together and enable recognition, as Greek historian Herodotus writes."