In my country, in the deep South of Italy, in the heart of Appenninian Mountains there is a high peak, named monte Pollino, more than two thousand meters, in the narrowest part of Calabria. It is not a well-ordered mountain, as in the Alps, with regular large valleys and rivers, running in well-established directions. It is instead a clumsy bunch of gorges and landslides, narrow streams and thick woods. No clear structure, no sharp direction, a sunny chaos of green bushes and blue sky. From the highest top of this mountain it is possible to see northwards the coast of the Tirrenian See, as far as Elea, country of Parmenides and Zeno, and southwards the coast of the Ionian See, from Sybaris and Croton to Metapontum and Tarentum, where Pythagoras and Architas lived and taught. It must be an old, holy mountain, for on one of its peaks there is a monastery. There, each year at the beginning of July, from the whole region a great pilgrimage of people on foot with their flocks flows toward the peak for an holiday, which reminds old pre-Greek Mediterranean rites, as those revealed by archaeologists in Crete. Also the name of the mountain maybe stems from mons Apollineus, that is Apollo's mount. There, on the slopes of the mountain, I fancy, twenty-five centuries ago, an old Pythagoras and a young Parmenides following a path toward the temple on the peak, and arguing about the ... 'following a path'. They knew that a path is not 'traced' by anybody, but it is only the sum of thousands of steps of people and flocks, going to mountain passes, springs, pastures, folds. Sometimes sharp and well delimited, sometimes splitted in dozens of faint traces on the grass. Sometimes a well traced path vanishes in the bush. Sometimes a big tree or a strange rock or some heap of stones, piled up by shepherds, are hints for the wanderers.

Pyth.: A path is a trace, but which kind of trace? There are so many traces on the grass! How many steps for a path? One? One hundred? If I walk in this clearing I leave a slight trace, but not a path. If a whole flock spends a week in a pasture, it leaves a huge trace, almost a desert, but not a path. However, the first animal going to that spring was sufficient to create this path.

Parm.: Right. Thus, I think that in a true path there is no problem of number of steps, but there must be a recognisable direction. And there are other well defined aspects of a path: it steadily goes up or down, avoids the obstacles, and so on.

Pyth.: The same is true for the streams, and nothing can distinguish their 'directed' beds from a path.

Parm.: If you were right, no objective feature could characterise a path, and every random wandering could be said a 'following a path'. But thus the very idea of path vanishes. I could instead advocate the idea that a path is characterised by its starting and ending points. So that this is not simply a path, but the path from Acquafredda to Passo del Vascello.

Pyth.: It could be only an old, today useless path. It could finish in a ravine, and thousands of men and animals, deceived by its appearance, as we do, followed the trace, found their death. We too, maybe, are walking toward our ruin, bringing our little contributions of steps to a stronger establishment of this deadly trace as a path. Or maybe it was a path in the past, but now it has been interrupted by a landslide, and it is no more a path. It could be doubtful also to follow an already travelled and perfectly reminded path.

Parm.: How is it possible?

Pyth.: Easy. Now we are following this track in the summer. Suppose that following this path really means to follow the main track in the dry season and an higher trace on the rocks in the rain season. Well, if this winter you travel this track you are not following this path!

Parm.: Right. And surprising.

The sky was clear and the sun bright. The air was getting warmer and they began to sweat. At this point, under a high towering rock, they found a cross-roads.

Parm.: My friend told me to turn right at the second cross-roads, and just half an hour before we found a first cross-roads. Are these kinds of hints the real nature of a path, its definition.

Pyth.: Are you sure it was a cross-roads? It looked like a temporary splitting of the path, and maybe it was only a trace and not a path. After all, if we have no objective characterisation of a path, it is also impossible to get it in terms of paths and cross-roads!

Parm.: I remember! My friend told me something about a horse-shaped rock.

Pyth.: This rock is not horse-shaped, but bird-shaped, I dare say.

They were becoming more and more angry, for the troubles of the path under the sun were increasing the warmth of their arguing about the definition of 'following a path'. After half a mile they saw a heap of stones, surely piled up by human hands to denote the path.

Parm.: Look there! This is the right path. And this is also the answer to our debate. Signs. They can denote the path. You can use heaps of stones or strange rocks or big fallen trees...

Pyth.: But these can be natural events, not referred to any aim, created by casual facts and destroyed by casual facts. A wolf tomorrow can scatter those stones and another tree can fall down out of the path.

Parm.: You can write something: letters, numbers...

Pyth.: Look on that stone: there is a gamma which could be a casual scratch. And also if it has been written by human hands, what does it mean? The name of a place? The number 3, the third path? The first letter of the name of a girlfriend?

Parm.: Any sign can denote anything and nothing. To be something more than a casual or artificial but meaningless scratch, any sign need an interpreter.

Pyth.: No, any sign needs THE interpreter!

Parm.: The God of Signs.

Pyth.: Or the Pollino Natural Park Agency.

Parm.: However, there is a God of Signs: Zeus. For example the big stone left by Zeus to show the road to the river Laos.

Pyth.: Dear Parmenides, do not forget the tales of your grandmother. That stone was thrown by Zeus during its fight against the Titans only to kill them. And if you do not believe in Zeus you can't believe either that he left that stone for any reason.

Parm.: Apollo, the Lord of Delphi. His Sibyl gives signs...

Pyth.: Meaningless signs. A friend of mine, Heraclitus, says that those signs neither say nor conceal, neither assert nor deny anything. They are simple signs, without any God of Signs.

The sun was high, and they were sweaty, hungry and tired. But the temple was near, and they sat down in the shade of a beech. There was a spring from the rocks and a little shrine, dedicated to the local nymph. They ate some blackberries from a near bush.

Parm.: If the signs cannot mean anything without THE subject, who is THE subject of the numbers? Maybe the numbers actually exist, have an own reality and not only the ghostly life of the signs.

Pyth.: Once I believed they were real. But now I do not know: recently I had a lot of troubles with the diagonal of the square... After all they are simply adjectives, as red or good. Yesterday I asked about this problem my dog, Psyche, who is very wise. She in the previous life was an eastern shaman.

Parm.(skeptical): Oh, really?

Pyth.: Yes. And she answered me - My dear lord, any morning you take me for a walk, and I urinate along the walk to mark the boundaries of my territory. So that, any other dog can realise he is entering in my zone. Surely the urine is real. But is the 'boundary' real, beyond a doggish 'smelling paradigm'?

Parm.: Skillful indeed. And you?

Pyth.: I asked her about the possibility of a more general, objective interpretation of his urine as a boundary.

Parm.: And...

Pyth.: She said - arf, arf, arf - and licked my nose.

They returned in the sunny afternoon, climbing up the path in a thick wood of oaks and beeches. Sometimes the path got narrower vanishing in the Mediterranean bush. Finally they arrived to another heap of stones, near a cross-roads.

Pyth.: In this zone many years ago I left a heap of stone, with a special shape, to denote a trace leading to a landslide, a sort of sign for the non-path.

Parm.: Which shape?

Pyth.: I do not remember, but I made up a rhyme to remember that shape.

Parm.: Do you remember that rhyme?

Pyth.: Yes, but I do not remember which kind of relation linked the rhyme to the shape.

Parm.: Fine. To create a knowledge based on the signs we have to give a unique meaning to the signs. And to give some meaning to the signs, we need more signs.

Pyth.: We have to create our world as a world of signs, and it must mirror a world of signs we have to create also in our minds. And our houses and our roads must be materialised signs. We must reproduce our goods as we reproduce our signs and exchange them by other signs...

Parm.: What are you eating?

Pyth.: Mandragora. It helps me to have visions.

Parm.: And are they true?

Pyth.: I think not. I see so strange and queer things: flying cars, terrible weapons... And now, this ghostly world of signs... We live in strange times... The wisdom we learnt from our parents is vanishing. Once we had only to remember those myths which covered the world as a dress of names, rites, traditions. And now, this strange new knowledge made up by signs, rules, reason. Something to repeat, instead of something to remember.

Parm.: But how could we constrain the people to an unified behaviour toward the first elementary signs, on which to build up the rest of this world?

Pyth.: A place, where to constrain them when they are very young to an unified code of behaviour toward the first signs, numbers and letters most of all.

Parm.: A school! Now our children spend their time learning only music and gymnastic. Nothing to deal with the signs.

Pyth.: Nevertheless I believe that music...

Parm.: I know, I know. But our students don't learn your arithmetic music, but only verses and instruments.

Pyth.: In Egypt in the temples the scribes...

Parm.: Yes, but they are so few and write so little. They are priests and we are citizens! Everybody among us must write and count. And we must write everything, our drama and our laws, history and mathematics!

Pyth.(thoughtful): A school... Every day thousand of boys and girls, with paper and pen...A school of signs...

Luckily for the history of western philosophy they chose the right path, and finally reached the temple.

Pyth.: I found a grass which changes a donkey in a centaur.

Parm.(skeptic): Really? Behind them the first shadows of the sunset filled the eastern slopes of Serra delle Ciavole, whereas the last sun rays lighted the western slopes of Falconara.

Pyth.: In any valley there is always a lighted side and a shady side. A friend of mine...

Parm.: I know, Heraclitus. I don't like that eastern guy. Babylonian. Buddhist.

Croaking of the ravens greeted the night. In the dusk, the paths disappeared and the nymphs came back to their springs and their oaks. The philosophers left the black mountain without paths, and the wood quickly forgot their presence and their words. For, you know, there has never been and there will never be a God of Signs.