Oct 15, 2025
Landing at Fiumicino in Rome (also known as the Leonardo da Vinci Airport) I couldn’t help but be struck by the poetry of its symbolism: arriving in what was once the capital of the ancient world, through an airport named after a man who redefined human potential.
Walking through the open-air museums of Rome and Florence, with my AI chatbot in my ears acting as a personalized audio guide, adapting the tour to my questions and curiosities, I was reminded that the Renaissance wasn’t just a rebirth of art, it was a shift in thinking. From “what is” to “what if.”
A new paradigm where curiosity replaced certainty, imagination redefined imposed knowledge, and disciplines intertwined to build the modern world. Perspective entered paintings, proportion found its place in architecture, and observation became the foundation of discovery.
What struck me most is that progress didn’t come from breaking away from the past, it came from building upon it. The great minds of that era reached backward to classical philosophy, geometry, and ancient texts not with nostalgia, but with imagination. Innovation came from the creative synthesis between memory and possibility.
It was this intellectual restlessness, this refusal to accept the given, that fueled the Renaissance. And it’s that same restlessness we must revive today.
Today, we stand once again at another inflection point. Our infrastructures - political, technological, ecological - strain under the weight of our contradictions. Global systems are being questioned, trust is fading, and the question of what matters most feels increasingly blurred.
I can’t help but feel that what the world needs again are polymaths: people who think across boundaries, blend disciplines, and bridge art and science, technology and humanity, reason and wonder.
The next renaissance won’t come from invention alone, but from integration: remembering how to think like polymaths again, to reimagine old wisdom in new contexts.
So as we navigate our changing world, perhaps what we need now isn’t more specialization, but more synthesis.
Not faster answers, but better questions.
Not certainty, but curiosity.
Our greatest act of progress becomes to remember how to imagine again.
Reviving the old ways for the new age isn’t regression, it’s renaissance, and every renaissance begins with someone daring to ask, what if?