ABSTRACT
In the late essay ‘Una bottiglia di sole’, which appears in the 1986 collection Racconti e saggi, Levi meditates on what constitutes a human being. If one only considers those alive today, there is, he feels, no ambiguity about which beings are human and which are not; it is only when we look back into the past that doubts spring up regarding the point at which we became ‘human’. Was it when our ancestors began to walk upright, or when the institutions of marriage and justice were established? In other words, is it a question of physiological evolution or of socio-cultural development? Rather than answering this question by recourse to Darwinian evolutionary theory, which we might have expected given his sympathies,1 Levi provides the curious defi nition of a human being cited previously, that humans possess a unique ability and propensity to construct receptacles or containers. He goes on to explain that this activity is symptomatic of two vital human characteristics: the capacity to think of the future and the capacity to predict the behaviour of material placed within these containers.
