Carlo Ossola is a philologist and literary critic. He teaches at the Collège de France, with a chair in Modern Literature of Neo-Latin Europe. His books and essays, brilliantly mixing philological research with the history of ideas, focus on both Renaissance culture and contemporary authors. Stefano Salis is the editor of the opinion desk of "Sole 24 Ore," with interests in publishing, literature, and music. He has taught classes and run workshops on cultural journalism in various Milanese universities. Marguerite Yourcenar was a French writer and poetess. She was the first woman elected to the Académie Française; for her masterpiece Memoirs of Hadrian she was a close contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. François Farges is a mineralogist and a French academic. He is a professor at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris. He specializes in enviromental and patrimonial mineralogy (history and reconstruction of the great legendary gems of history).