There are books that are not merely read — they are ascended.
Books that demand not an act of intellect, but of devotion; that ask the reader to leave behind the plain of commentary and climb, step by step, along a path of contemplation.
Il cielo più vicino by Vittorio Sgarbi belongs to that rare lineage of works which reconcile thought with vision, word with silence.
It is a book that does not describe the mountain: it transfigures it.

Sgarbi’s mountain is both idea and substance, spirit and stone, breath and measure.
Across seven centuries of painting and memory, from the Trecento to the dawn of the twentieth century, he reconstructs not the history of a motif but the itinerary of Western consciousness toward its lost height.
Giotto opens the path, raising the Franciscan rock to a symbol of incarnate faith; Masolino softens its light, and within his serene vision the world seems mirrored in gentler air.
Then come Piero della Francesca and Bellini, Turner and Friedrich, Courbet and Segantini, until Ghirri, Buzzati, Musić — each leaving, within the book, the trace of a completed or interrupted ascent, a nostalgia for heaven that never fades.

Sgarbi does not write as a critic, but as a traveller of the absolute.
He walks among artworks as among inner summits, and every name, every painting, every vision becomes a station of aesthetic pilgrimage.
His prose has the step of a mountaineer and the lightness of high air: it knows fatigue yet also the joy of arriving where the air grows rare and pure.
Beneath every line one feels a slow, almost liturgical breathing; a secret musicality that turns description into prayer, criticism into song.

What strikes the most is the luminous coherence of his thought.
He traverses the centuries without losing the compass of beauty, rejecting the arrogance of those who measure art by the yardstick of the present.
For him, the mountain is not a metaphor of progress but of memory; not domination but listening.
Every ascent is a return.
And when he writes of painted peaks, of snows, of skies bending upon the rocks, he is not writing art history but a natural theology, as though resuming a conversation long interrupted between man and the divine.

The book moved me deeply — not only for the limpidity of its style or the vastness of its culture, but for the inner tone that unites erudition with intimacy of soul.
I read it as a journey of reconciliation, a long march toward the purity of vision, a mute dialogue with the better part of ourselves.
It is rare today to find a text that restores dignity to contemplation; Sgarbi succeeds, simply and firmly, reminding us that beauty is always an exercise in truth.

Equally sublime is the iconographic selection that accompanies the volume: plates arranged with musical wisdom, pairings that breathe like accords, images that do not illustrate but amplify the text.
One has the feeling of leafing not through a treatise, but through a breviary of images — a visual rosary that marks the liturgy of seeing.
Each reproduction, from Giotto to Friedrich, from Masolino to Ghirri, is chosen for inner resonance, as if the Professor had placed the works according to the rhythm of a contemplative heart.
The effect is extraordinary: word and image pursue one another, answer one another, complete one another.

In the closing chapters, where the discourse grows more personal, Sgarbi regains the voice of the witness — of one who has seen and wishes to transmit.
He speaks of the mountain as a threshold between the human and the divine, a boundary where stone becomes thought and light becomes knowledge.
And in those final pages, entitled The Measure of the Soul, art is transfigured into a philosophy of limit.
To climb means to understand that one cannot possess; it means accepting that the eternal allows itself to be touched only, never held.

In a time when everything descends and dissolves, Il cielo più vicino reminds us of the need to rise again.
Sgarbi invites us to breathe the clear air of the heights, to look at the world from that angle of purity which painting — more than any other art — can evoke.
It is a book that reconciles knowledge with grace, criticism with prayer, intellect with longing.
One closes it and feels within a lingering echo of silence, a light that keeps ascending inside us: il cielo più vicino, indeed.